Shawn Smucker
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Ignite Your Soul
$18.99Add to cartRevive Your Whole Self: Spiritually, Mentally, and Emotionally
Burned out? Exhausted? Feeling isolated and like there’s no end in sight? Find hope, direction, and a path to renewed life. Ignite Your Soul is a lifeline to help you restore your spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being and navigate the complex landscape of soul care within the communities you live and serve in. Whether you seek refreshment for yourself or those you lead, you’ll explore six key practices that lead to whole-self flourishing:
*attention,
*participation,
*delight,
*humility,
*silence, and
*rest.In December 2021, Mindy and her husband, Jeff, bore witness to a wildfire’s relentless advance on their Colorado property dedicated to spiritual rest and retreat. The devastation of that fire underscored the realization that mirrored the parched reality of many people’s souls. So many of us are exhausted and overwhelmed, and we feel alone, silently struggling with addiction, busyness, distractions, fear, and apathy. Ignite Your Soul walks through the journey from pre-burnout to destruction and the path to healings so that you can walk out of your own ashes and into practices like journaling, prayer, and a rule of life and more, to thrive no matter what you face. Ignite Your Soul is a lifeline to help you restore your spiritual, emotional, and mental well-being within the communities you life and serve in.
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These Nameless Things
$18.00Add to cartBefore Dan opened his door to find a wounded woman who had escaped from the tormentors in the mountain, his life had become rather quiet. He and the eight other people in the mostly abandoned town had become friends. They spent peaceful evenings around the campfire and even made vague plans to journey east one day and leave the ominous mountain behind.
But the woman’s arrival changes everything.
Who is she? How does she know so much about Dan’s brother, who is still held captive in the mountain? Why are long-forgotten memories rising to the surface? And why does Dan feel so compelled to keep her presence in his house a secret?
Visionary writer Shawn Smucker is back with an unsettling story that invites us to consider two challenging questions: To what lengths will we go to assuage our own guilt? and Is there a limit to the things we will do for the people we love?
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Light From Distant Stars
$21.00Add to cartWhen Cohen Marah steps over his father’s body in the basement embalming room of the family’s funeral home, he has no idea that he is stepping into a labyrinth of memory. As the last one to see his father, Cohen is the primary suspect.
Over the next week, Cohen’s childhood memories come back in living color. The dramatic events that led to his father being asked to leave his pastoral position. The game of baseball that somehow kept them together. And the two children in the forest who became his friends–and enlisted him in a dark and dangerous undertaking. As the lines blur between what was real and what was imaginary, Cohen is faced with the question he’s been avoiding: Did he kill his father?
In Light from Distant Stars, master story weaver Shawn Smucker relays a tale both eerie and enchanting, one that will have you questioning reality and reaching out for what is true, good, and genuine.
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Light From Distant Stars
$29.99Add to cartWhen Cohen Marah steps over his father’s body in the basement embalming room of the family’s funeral home, he has no idea that he is stepping into a labyrinth of memory. As the last one to see his father, Cohen is the primary suspect.
Over the next week, Cohen’s childhood memories come back in living color. The dramatic events that led to his father being asked to leave his pastoral position. The game of baseball that somehow kept them together. And the two children in the forest who became his friends–and enlisted him in a dark and dangerous undertaking. As the lines blur between what was real and what was imaginary, Cohen is faced with the question he’s been avoiding: Did he kill his father?
In Light from Distant Stars, master story weaver Shawn Smucker relays a tale both eerie and enchanting, one that will have you questioning reality and reaching out for what is true, good, and genuine.
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Once We Were Strangers (Reprinted)
$14.99Add to cartIn 2012, Mohammad fled his Syrian village along with his wife and four sons, escaping to Jordan through the wilderness. Four years later he sat across from Shawn Smucker in a small conference room in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Though neither of them knew it, Mohammad had arrived in Shawn’s life just in time.
This is the story of a friendship. It is the story of a middle-aged writer struggling to make a living and a Syrian refugee struggling to create a life for his family in a strange and sometimes hostile land. It’s the story of two fathers hoping for the best, two hearts seeking compassion, two lives changed forever. It’s the story of our moment in history and the opportunities it gives us to show love and hospitality to the sojourner in our midst.
Anyone who has felt torn between the desire for security and the desire to offer sanctuary to those fleeing war and violence will find Shawn Smucker a careful and loving guide on the road to mercy and unity.
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Day The Angels Fell
$17.00Add to cartIt was the summer of storms and strays and strangers. The summer that lightning struck the big oak tree in the front yard. The summer his mother died in a tragic accident. As he recalls the tumultuous events that launched a surprising journey, Samuel can still hardly believe it all happened.
After his mother’s death, twelve-year-old Samuel Chambers would do anything to bring her back. Prompted by three strange carnival fortune-tellers and the surfacing of his mysterious and reclusive neighbor, Sam begins his search for the Tree of Life–the only thing that could possibly bring his mother back. His quest to defeat death entangles him and his best friend Abra in an ancient conflict and forces Sam to grapple with an unwelcome question: could it be possible that death is a gift?
Haunting and hypnotic, The Day the Angels Fell explores the difficult questions of life in a voice that is fresh, friendly, and unafraid. With this powerful story, Shawn Smucker has carved out a spot for himself in the tradition of authors Madeleine L’Engle and Lois Lowry.
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Think No Evil
$16.99Add to cartAn insider s look into the events surrounding the nickel mines amish schoolhouse shootings told by the counselor who was called upon to come to the farmhouse where the families met on that fateful day.
On October 2, 2006, Charles Roberts, a local milk-tank truck driver, bound and shot ten young girls in an Amish schoolhouse before committing suicide. Five girls died. Five others were severely injured and left in critical condition. In the aftermath of the massacre, the Amish community shunned the media. But they requested that Amishraised counselor Jonas Beiler come to the scene to offer his moral and spiritual support.
In “Think No Evil,” Beiler offers his first-person account of the events, as well as of those who were closest to the scene: the surviving children, the volunteer fireman Rob Beiler, the local counseling center director Brad Aldricha, and Vietta Zook, aboard the first ambulance to arrive. Beiler poignantly describes the Amish families responses to this horrific violence as they reached out to the shocked family members of the killer, offering unconditional forgiveness.
The story didn’t end on that horrible day with the deaths of those five little girls. “Think No Evil “follows the ongoing story of this gentle community having faith in God s design, of truly demonstrating Christian values, of responding with resilient love in the face of evil, of demolishing the scene of the murders and rebuilding the schoolhouse, and of determining to move forward in living out their faith in peace.”
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Break Away Amish
$28.99Add to cart21 Chapters
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“I am the grandson of Bishop Sam Mullet, who was arrested for the Amish beard-cutting attacks. This is my story.”Beard-cutting attacks on Amish people in the middle of the night. Five incidents. Nine victims. How could members of a Christian tradition known for peace and forgiveness enact such violence? What could make members of one Amish group turn against other Amish? In Breakaway Amish, Johnny Mast tells in riveting detail how his Amish community became increasingly isolated from other Amish people, and how the wishes and edicts of his grandfather, Bishop Sam Mullet, overtook daily life in the group. Over time, members became convinced that cutting their own hair was a sign of repentance and remorse. When that conviction led them to cut off the beards of those outside their community, however, it was more than a strange religious ritual. It was a crime.
Here is an eyewitness account of the disturbing events at Bergholz, an Amish community gone awry. Yet redemption dwells even here, in the bravery and conviction of one who chose to break free.