Courtney Ellis
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Looking Up : A Birder’s Guide To Hope Through Grief
$18.00Add to cart“Look at the birds”
Through the painful days of the pandemic stuck in her home, Courtney Ellis found herself looking down in despair. Soon after, her beloved grandfather died unexpectedly.
It was around this same time that Ellis took up watching birds. “Took up” might not be exactly right–as she puts it, “the switch flipped,” and she’s been borderline obsessed with birds ever since.
Looking Up is a meditation on birding as a practice of hope. Weaving together stories from her own life, including the death of her grandfather, with reflections on birds of many kinds, Ellis invites us to open our eyes to the goodness of God both in the natural world and in our own lives. By “looking up” to the birds, Ellis found the beauty and wonder of these creatures calling her out of her darkness into the light and hope of God’s promises.
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Present : The Gift Of Being All In Right Where You Are
$16.99Add to cartPresent is an invitation to a deeper, richer, quieter life with God. So often we sleepwalk through our days, but there is a tremendous gift in practicing awareness right where we are.In a world marked by transience, envy, and rootlessness, committing to staying put is a radical, unusual act. Hungry for rootedness, Courtney Ellis and her family decided to truly commit to a place and a people God had given them for a season, to grow some deep roots and discover what it would mean to be “all in.” Through winsome storytelling, Courtney demonstrates that there is tremendous growth when we stop holding a community at arms’ length and open ourselves to the blessing of stability, the grace of limits, and the joy of presence. This book is divided into these three major sections, with chapters devoted to each of the gifts that come with our increased attention to being all in fully present, right where we are.
Join Courtney for a thoughtful, funny, and realistic exploration of stability, limit, and presence as means of grace. Journey deeper into the heart of God that calls us to cultivate community being present to what God has placed before us and discovering the gifts of the present. Delve into reasons readers might experience transience, how to press in when called to that, and how to know when it’s time to move on. Explore the ways borders and boundaries in our lives are for our good. When we are able to say, “This is my place, and these are my people,” and then, like Ruth, really commit, beautiful things can happen. With humor and honesty, Courtney draws in readers who are longing for that rootedness, trying to figure out how to make this place their own in other words, those who are figuring out how to be all in, right where they are, for the time God has given them.
