Read the Book and Join Us!

Something New for You: Women of the Harvest will be launching this blog on Monday, April 5.

The WOTH Book Club Blog will be a place of community where women serving cross-culturally will gather to read and discuss great books--fiction and non-fiction, Christian and secular--with other cross-cultural women. Participants will be exposed to new authors, stories and concepts while reading writers who think like us and others who may disagree with us. Readers will be challenged to think, consider, and find words to respond to new thoughts, disagreeable conclusions, and age old dilemmas staged in new scenes. There will be content to wrestle with, to laugh about, to ponder, and hopefully, growth in understanding the world around us and how God would have us respond to it.

Linda Swanson will be our host and moderator.

Linda served as a cross-cultural worker for 28 years with MAF, both overseas and at headquarters. During eight of those years, she helped direct Fairhaven Ministries, a retreat center for pastors and workers. Now, Linda serves as Executive Assistant to the President and Coordinator of Communities for Link Care Center, a counseling ministry for workers and pastors in Fresno, CA. Linda’s husband, Kevin, is a pastor of a Covenant Church in Murphys, CA. Their two children are married, and they have one grandson. Linda is a speaker, writer, spiritual director and loves hiking, canoeing and learning to paint.

From Linda:
Hi to all! I would like to choose Cries of the Heart, by Ravi Zacharias for our first book. From the back cover:

*A dream job.
*Beautiful kids.
*The best marriage.

*And a growing feeling of absolute emptiness...

In Cries of the Heart, Ravi Zacharias explores the inner feeling of futility that can overwhelm a human heart and help us to:

*See a reason in our suffering
*Ease our guilty consciences
*Find freedom in pleasure
*Be comforted in our loneliness
*Truly know God
*Experience an abiding faith in our daily lives

This is a book that both inspires and reassures... a search that uncovers our hidden sentiments and reveals God's continual, inescapable presence in every moment of our lives... a journey that ends in the consummate answer to the cries of the heart.

This book club offering will cover 8 weeks, with week 1 being introduction to the 7 chapters.