Friendship Development

Many of us wish to share a meal, share our faith, and share our lives with others. We want to open our home to friends and neighbors for the sake of meaningful community, but we're overwhelmed with hospitality hang-ups. Our welcome has been influenced by the messages of the world that tell us hospitality is about our ability to be, host, live, and cook a certain way. In Gather & Give, Amy Hannon inspires you to embrace the simple hospitality of the Bible that values connection more than perfection and people more than presentation.

Set great boundaries and unlock true freedom in your relationships—even if you've felt completely overwhelmed and powerless in the past. Do you constantly find yourself stretched thin, feeling as though you're living for others and neglecting yourself? Do you struggle to maintain a healthy balance between your personal life and work, constantly feeling like you're on the verge of burning out? You're not alone.

For years, "Fisher King Mike" wandered the streets of LA, preaching to his people. On occasion, he'd share an open mic night with Michael Konik, who befriended the homeless man at a distance and offered a confused but sympathetic ear when the Fisher King lamented having to be so far away from his wife, Selena Gomez, and their several children. As the pair began to cautiously trust one another, confusion and distance gave way to friendship, and what came next astounded them both.

Social isolation can shatter our confidence. In isolating times, we're not only lonely, but we're ashamed of our loneliness because our society stigmatizes people who are alone without support. As a single, 58-year-old woman who finds herself stranded after major surgery, Val Walker has woven into the narrative her own story. A well-established rehabilitation counselor, she was too embarrassed to reveal on social media how utterly isolated she was by asking for someone to help, and it felt agonizingly awkward calling colleagues out of the blue.

Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honours the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary - friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back.

Priced out of their Manhattan neighborhood, Jessica and Aaron move with their young daughters to the one place Jessica swore she'd never go: the suburbs. But to Jessica's surprise, life in the commuter belt makes a great first impression. She quickly falls in with a clique of helpful mom friends, and she's thrilled when she's invited to a moms-only weekend at the beach. The trip turns into a series of eye-opening lessons, and Jessica must decide if she's strong enough to be honest with herself about the sort of life she really wants.

In his late teens Tom Macher rebelled against a world that seemed stacked against him. Raised in a broken family and estranged from an absentee father suffering with AIDS, Macher turned to alcohol to escape the painful loneliness of his reality. In quick succession, he is kicked out of school, and then his mother's house, sent to a boys' home in Montana, and later, a halfway house in a truck-stop town of Louisiana. It was there that Macher encounters a community of young men struggling to survive.

Rachel feels like she doesn't fit in - until she finds heavy metal and meets Fern, a kindred spirit. The two form their own band, but the metal scene turns out to be no different from the misogynist world they want to change. Violent encounters escalate, and the friends decide there's only one way forward....

How many rules would you break to fulfill a loved one's wishes? Clover House is a home run by the local council. Residents are there because their parents, family, or the community can no longer deal with their behavior. Leo French has lived at Clover House for nearly eight years. For Leo life was dull and mundane; that was, until Julie Sykes arrived. After uncovering Julie's secret, Leo uses his limited time and resources to make her wishes come true. At the time he had no idea it would include foreign travel, theft, and attempted murder....

Kelly Wilder becomes recently widowed from a much older wealthy man with whom she spent her married life, as she says, 'pretending to be a whole lot more conservative and stupid and nicer than I really am.' Now, with too much time and money on her hands, Kelly has absolutely no idea what happens next. So, on a whim, she signs up for a ballroom dancing class, and begins to rebuild her life with the help of friends old and new.

Der Zustand unserer Erde ist ein Spiegel unserer Gesellschaft. So, wie wir den Planeten ausbeuten, handeln wir auch in unseren Beziehungen: vorwiegend nutzenorientiert. Um wirklich nachhaltiger zu leben, müssen wir unsere Beziehungsmuster kritisch hinterfragen und zum Positiven verändern. Dieses Hörbuch macht Mut, das Thema Nachhaltigkeit aus einer neuen Perspektive zu betrachten.

Pat Conroy was America's poet laureate of family dysfunction. A larger-than-life character and the author of such classics as The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini, Conroy was remembered by everybody for his energy, his exuberance, and his self-lacerating humor. Michael Mewshaw's The Lost Prince is an intimate memoir of his friendship with Pat Conroy, one that involves their families and those days in Rome when they were both young - when Conroy went from being a popular regional writer to an internationally best-selling author.

A story of friendship, family, love and loss set against the grimy and glittering streets of '50s Soho. For fans of Kate Furnivall and Rachel Rhys. In a city of strangers, who can you trust? London, 1952. Dina Demetriou has travelled from Cyprus for a better life. She's certain that excitement, adventure and opportunity are out there, waiting - if only she knew where to look. Her passion for clothes and flair for sewing land her a job repairing the glittering costumes at the notorious Pelican Revue. It's here that she befriends the mysterious and beautiful Bebba.

Jack London’s White Fang is an impactful examination of the harsh realities of nature and the damage humans can cause, but also of the will to survive that is common between humans and wild animals alike. The story follows White Fang, a feisty wolf pup that becomes a vicious wolf due to his interactions with harsh human masters. He is shuffled between masters throughout his life and taught to be destructive but is eventually shown love and compassion by a human and learns gentleness as an adult wolf.

We know that our friendships increase our happiness, our health, and our longevity, yet people in the US have fewer close confidantes today than we did three decades ago. Even though there’s a huge amount of information in the media discussing these relationships, and our social media feeds run 24/7, most of us haven’t come up with a constructive approach to friendship. But learning to be a better friend is the first step to acquiring and cultivating better, more rewarding friendships.

When a rattlesnake almost kills his best friend Caesar “Cwiz” (pronounced Quiz) Ruiz, author Jeremy Rhyne can’t help but recall all of the wild times they shared growing up in Southern California - and the profound impression Cwiz has made on his life. Starting with a covert one-man band in a high school health class that had the entire room laughing, Cwiz always kept Jeremy on his toes.

A ruthless and illuminating exploration of the friendships that dominated, influenced, nourished, inspired, haunted - and sometimes tore her apart - Susanna Sonnenberg has written a book as searing and superb as her first book about her mother, Her Last Death. Childhood friendships, friendships with older women, friendships that play out with the passion and intensity of love affairs, the friendships between new mothers - each has its own subtleties, its own lessons that Sonnenberg examines and understands with astounding acuity.

An illuminating, intricately woven memoir about friendships, loss, and language—a stunning affirmation of the conversations that shape and sustain us, even in the presence of death.

Dear White Woman, Please Come Home is Kimberlee Yolanda Williams's invitation to white women longing for authentic friendship with Black and brown women, the kind of friendship with no place for secrets, the kind of relationship where truth-telling is welcome, even when it hurts. The idea for the book was born after attending a workshop that left her shaken and angry. In it, Kimberlee listened as white woman after white woman didn't understand how this or that comment, custom, behavior, or norm so negatively impacted women of color.

They can’t all be your best friend. But they can all be part of your rich circle of friendships. Sometimes we feel disappointment over a relationship that means something different to us than to the other person. This can lead to a lack of appreciation for the friendship in its current state, misplaced expectations, or other conflicts. Because relationships can be challenging, it is helpful to step back and do a little defining of our circles of friendship.