Designed for Relationship Winner!

Congratulations goes out to Dorothy T., who won a copy of Designed for Relationship by T. J. MacLeslie.

Thanks to all who participated. Look for more giveaways coming soon.

Guest Blogger and Giveaway: T.J. MacLeslie, Author of Designed for Relationship

Mankind has always struggled with the big questions: Why are we here? What is life all about? The search for answers has led in many directions, not all of them helpful. In this age, we are inundated with information, but this flood of knowledge has not necessarily produced wisdom. We find answers to the really important questions as elusive as ever.

It really is all about relationship! This is the open secret, hidden in plain sight all along.

Purchase paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Relationship-Learning-Love-God/dp/0989016609

Purchase digital: http://www.amazon.com/Designed-Relationship-Learning-Love-ebook/dp/B00DJZW286

An Invitation by T.J. MacLeslie

There are many ideas about God circulating these days. Many of these portraits of God are ultimately lacking — painted with blacks and whites, depicting a forbidding and distant monarch or judge as their subject. Some are soft and blurry like the warm fuzziness of a Hollywood close-up but with little substance and clarity. Few today depict God as Trinity inviting us into a radically realigning relationship with Himself.

The Bible teaches that behind everything that exists is an eternal, divine Community. God is, by definition, always relating. God is not a force, but a unity of persons. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit are each persons with emotions, will, intellect, etc. Together, They are the one true God.

This relational God chose to create us and to reveal Himself to us. This revelation of Himself actually started before the creation of the first human. He showed forth His power and wisdom in creation before there was a single person outside His Trinitarian Self to appreciate it. Before the foundation of the world, God is, and God is community. Our God is One and Three; the One true God of the Bible is not a singularity but a plurality. This is the mystery of the Tri-unity, the Trinity.

This Trinitarian Being created humans in Their image. When They created the first human, They invited us into fellowship with Them. As creatures made in the image of God, humans also are inherently relational because we were made to relate to God. Our capacities are best expressed in and through relationships. We were designed with eternal relationship in mind. We were imbued with an incredible capacity for love and unbroken relationship with God and one another. Scripture speaks of our time living and working in relationship with God and one another in paradise. We were given freedom to explore the world that points to Him – to walk and talk with Him in the paradise of His creation. Unfortunately, we spoiled paradise. Ever since, we live in a world of compounding unintended consequences. We were made for perfect, never-ending relationships; but we live in a broken world – a world where death destroys even the strongest of human relationships.

We were designed with the capacity for community, but we are born into a damaged world – a world where we experience isolation and separateness from birth. Many of us have been neglected by those who should have nurtured, preyed upon by those who should have protected. No matter what our family background, we have all experienced this brokenness, although not necessarily to the same degree. Through these and other experiences, we become isolated from one another. In extreme cases, we lose the ability to connect with others at all. Even the less wounded of us have been damaged in some way. We have all had our relational capacity stunted. We are broken, but not beyond repair. There is hope!

Today, even right now, the invitation is before us!

T.J. MacLeslie has been involved in a variety of Christian ministries since 1990, including pastoring, church planting, leadership development, prayer, and spiritual formation. He currently lives in the UK with his wife and two children where he leads a team focused on prayer and spiritual formation. You'll often find him walking the fields with his dog, reading a book, or enjoying a warm cup of coffee.

Visit the author online at http://www.about.me/tj_macleslie and his publisher at www.ParvaimPress.com.


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WWW Wednesdays - August 14th

This weekly meme is hosted by Should Be Reading.

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

• What are you currently reading?

• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?

What are you currently reading?

Gen's family is more comfortable spending time apart than together. Then Gen's mom signs them up for Camp Frontier—a vacation that promises the "thrill" of living like 1890s pioneers. Forced to give up all of her modern possessions, Gen nevertheless manages to email her friends back home about life at "Little Hell on the Prairie," as she's renamed the camp. It turns out frontier life isn't without its good points—like the cute boy who lives in the next clearing. And when her friends turn her emails into a blog, Gen is happily surprised by the fanbase that springs up. But just when it seems Gen and family might pull through the summer, disaster strikes as a TV crew descends on the camp, intent on discovering the girl behind the nationwide blogging sensation—and perhaps ruining the best vacation Gen has ever had.

This book is hilarious. I haven't laughed this loud in a long time.

What did you recently finish reading?

Mankind has always struggled with the big questions: Why are we here? What is life all about? The search for answers has led in many directions, not all of them helpful. In this age, we are inundated with information, but this flood of knowledge has not necessarily produced wisdom. We find answers to the really important questions as elusive as ever.

It really is all about relationship! This is the open secret, hidden in plain sight all along.

This is an eloquently written, powerful book for those looking to study the relational aspect of God and those wanting to learn how to love Him.

What do you think you’ll read next?

A ghost in Colonial dress has been wreaking havoc at an old plantation house in Virginia. The house is owned by Elizabeth Smithwood, the best friend of Ellen McKenzie’s Aunt Mary. Mary is determined to fly to the rescue, and Ellen has no choice but to leave her real estate business and new husband to accompany her. Who else will keep the old girl out of trouble? When Ellen and Aunt Mary arrive, they find that Elizabeth’s “house” comprises three sprawling buildings containing all manner of secret entrances and passages, not to mention slave cabins. But who owns what and who owned whom? After Monty—the so-called ghost and stepson of Elizabeth’s dead husband—turns up dead in Elizabeth’s house, suspicion falls on her. Especially when the cause of death is a poisoned glass of syllabub taken from a batch of the sweet, creamy after-dinner drink sitting in Elizabeth’s refrigerator. Monty had enemies to spare. Why was he roaming the old house? What was he searching for? To find the truth, Ellen and her Aunt Mary will have to do much more than rummage through stacks of old crates; they will have to expose two hundred years of grudges and vendettas. The spirits they disturb are far deadlier than the one who brought them to Virginia. Murder by Syllabub is the fifth book of the Ellen McKenzie Mystery series.

This one should be next because I'm due to review it at the beginning of September at The Book Connection.

WWW Wednesdays - August 7th

This weekly meme is hosted by Should Be Reading.

To play along, just answer the following three (3) questions…

• What are you currently reading?

• What did you recently finish reading?
• What do you think you’ll read next?


What are you currently reading?

I am currently reading Designed for Relationship by T. J. MacLeslie.

Mankind has always struggled with the big questions: Why are we here? What is life all about? The search for answers has led in many directions, not all of them helpful. In this age, we are inundated with information, but this flood of knowledge has not necessarily produced wisdom. We find answers to the really important questions as elusive as ever.

It really is all about relationship! This is the open secret, hidden in plain sight all along.

What did you recently finish reading?

Just polished off Don't Let the Wind Catch You by Aaron Paul Lazar.

When young Gus LeGarde befriends Tully, a cranky old hermit in the woods who speaks to an Indian spirit, he wonders if the man is nuts. But when the spirit rattles tin cups, draws on dusty mirrors, and flips book pages, pestering him to find evidence to avenge her past, things change fast. What Gus doesn’t understand is why his mother hates Tully and forbids him to see the old man. What could Tully have possibly done to earn this distrust?

Faced with long-buried family secrets and danger, Gus summons courage beyond his years in this poignant and powerful telling of the sultry summer of 1965.

What do you think you’ll read next?

Hoping to get to A Wilder Rose by Susan Wittig Albert.

In 1928, Rose Wilder Lane—world traveler, journalist, much-published magazine writer—returned from an Albanian sojourn to her parents’ Ozark farm. Almanzo Wilder was 71, Laura 61, and Rose felt obligated to stay and help. To make life easier, she built them a new home, while she and Helen Boylston transformed the farmhouse into a rural writing retreat and filled it with visiting New Yorkers. Rose sold magazine stories to pay the bills for both households, and despite the subterranean tension between mother and daughter, life seemed good.

Then came the Crash. Rose’s money vanished, the magazine market dried up, and the Depression darkened the nation. That’s when Laura wrote her autobiography, “Pioneer Girl,” the story of growing up in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, on the Kansas prairie, and by the shores of Silver Lake. The rest—the eight remarkable books that followed—is literary history.

But it isn’t the history we thought we knew. For the surprising truth is that Laura’s stories were publishable only with Rose’s expert rewriting. Based on Rose’s unpublished diaries and Laura’s letters, A Wilder Rose tells the true story of the decade-long, intensive, and often troubled collaboration that produced the Little House books—the collaboration that Rose and Laura deliberately hid from their agent, editors, reviewers, and readers.

Why did the two women conceal their writing partnership? What made them commit what amounts to one of the longest-running deceptions in American literature? And what happened in those years to change Rose from a left-leaning liberal to a passionate Libertarian?

In this impeccably researched novel and with a deep insight into the book-writing business gained from her own experience as an author and coauthor, Susan Wittig Albert follows the clues that take us straight to the heart of this fascinating literary mystery.

First Chapter Review: Designed for Relationship by T.J. MacLeslie

Designed for Relationship is a Christian living/spiritual relationship book from T.J. MacLeslie. I received a copy of this book from the author's publicist.

BLURB: Mankind has always struggled with the big questions: Why are we here? What is life all about? The search for answers has led in many directions, not all of them helpful. In this age, we are inundated with information, but this flood of knowledge has not necessarily produced wisdom. We find answers to the really important questions as elusive as ever.

It really is all about relationship! This is the open secret, hidden in plain sight all along.

COVER: This is a beautiful cover. It's peaceful and relaxing. The scenery is lovely. I have to admit that when I first glanced at it I thought it was more suited toward a fantasy novel than a non-fiction offering, but it does flow in nicely with the Christian journey mentioned within these pages.

FIRST CHAPTER: This chapter opens with a powerful retelling of the prodigal son. Then the author goes on to explain about the Trinity and how God wants us in relationship with Him.

KEEP READING: Definitely. My synopsis of the first chapter is very simplistic, because there is so much to this chapter, and I don't want to give too much away. This is one of the most powerful retellings of the parable of the prodigal son I have ever read, and I believe the main reason is something the author mentions during this first chapter: too often we focus on the story of the younger son who took his riches and then ran off, instead of seeing this story from the point of view of all three people. By seeing this parable from a different perspective, it becomes an even more powerful story, because as the author indicates, each son became a prodigal in his own way.

In Designed for Relationship, author T.J. MacLeslie's discussion on the Trinity gave me pause. He goes back to Genesis to remind the reader that God exists as a "Them as much as a Him." In the creation story from Genesis 1:26 it says, "Then God said, 'Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness;'..." I In all the years I have read and reread the Creation story, I missed God's reference to the Godhead here. And now I wonder how much else I might have missed.

As the chapter moves along, the author begins his discussion on God wanting to be in a relationship with us. As the Godhead, They created us to be relational beings in Their likeness. The ending of this chapter includes discussion questions for reflection.

I was so moved by the first chapter of this book, I can't wait to continue reading.

Paperback: 182 pages
Publisher: Parvaim Press (May 14, 2013)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0989016609
ISBN-13: 978-0989016605


I received a copy of this book from the author's publicist. This author is currently on tour with Pump Up Your Book. I have been paid a fee to promote this book as part of the tour. No portion of this fee included a review of any kind. This review contains my honest opinions, which I have not been compensated for in any way.