String Too Short To Be Saved

String Too Short to Tie

Told with humor and affection, String Too Short to Tie tells the story of the powerful ties of land and family. The author, called Dalinda in this memoir, rumbles down the dusty Texas road where she grew up, struggling with ambivalence toward proud family and friends who stayed while she left. Life has changed since the bustling time of the ’50s and ’70s when Buddy Holly was a sensation down the road in Lubbock and her rural town of Tumbleweed bustled with energy, plentiful water, and her beloved farm families prospered. What will she and her classmates have in common as they work to plan their 50th class reunion? How will they feel about the Midwestern teacher she became versus the Texas farm girl they knew? How will she ever work with her headstrong sister to figure out how to honor their family farm? Laugh and cry as Dalinda works to resolve conflicting values over land, entitlement and lifestyle, unearthing small nuggets of delight and redemption that come when each of us tumble back home and remember a time when we were all “raised with guilt and red Jell-O.”

String Too Short to be Saved

The Glenstal Prayerbook

The 2001 edition of the Glenstal Book of Prayer was an international bestseller. This edition was originally intended to be a reprint of that 2001 edition. But what has emerged is something quite different. There are many more prayers, and the biblical texts use a very different translation. Eugene Peterson’s influence runs through this prayer book, especially in the Introduction and in the use of The Message, his translation of the Bible. Prayer has not changed since 2001, but the world has moved on. Life is even more hectic, and hope has receded. There seems little time for an extra activity, especially prayer. This book is built on the premise that hectic though our lives are, we are deficient without a connection with the living God. Without this connection, we will spend our lives seeking to fill the God-shaped hole with substitutes. And they don’t deliver. Prayer is the language we use to sustain that relationship with the living God. We all need a ‘maintenance plan’ to sustain a faith in God—a life of faith. This book is intended as a part of that maintenance plan. The Glenstal Prayerbook provides a traditional approach to prayer, taking its essential form from the monastic prayer life as lived in Glenstal Abbey.