Starting Over: Your Life Beyond Regrets - Softcover

Ferguson, Dave; Ferguson, Jon

 
9781601426123: Starting Over: Your Life Beyond Regrets
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1601426127 ISBN 13: 9781601426123
Verlag: Multnomah, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

I wish I had loved more.
I wish I had been smarter about money.
I wish I had thought about God more.
 
We all have regrets about the past. Many of them come from our attempts to fulfill unmet longings. Dave and Jon Ferguson call this back and forth between longing and regret the Sorry Cycle—and they want to help us escape it.
 
In Starting Over, Dave and Jon show us how to recognize specific regrets and then release them to God as we learn to see our regrets as opportunities to start over. Finally, we can see God redeem our regrets as he takes the worst things in our lives and uses them for a greater good. In this new edition, Dave and Jon provide an inspiring and never before published case study for achieving real life change. 
 
Your regrets don’t need to keep you from the joy God has for your life. As you apply the recognize-release-redeem process to your financial, relational, and personal regrets, you will find new freedom in living out your God-given dreams.

Fall in Love with Your Regrets
 
It sounds impossible. How can we learn to love our mistakes and failures? Instead, we go over and over them in our mind. Could they ever bring us—or anyone else—good?
 
Drawing from scientific research and biblical truths, Jon and Dave Ferguson give us tools to redeem our mistakes in five key areas: relationships, health, purpose, finances, and spirituality. Along the way, they teach us lifelong skills for getting unstuck when regret threatens to trap us again. We also learn how to help others escape the Sorry Cycle and experience the Starting Over Loop.
 
It is possible to learn to love our regrets because through them we see God at work. We see that our weakness does not limit what God can do. Whatever regret is trapping you in the Sorry Cycle, God is big enough to redeem it. What could you do with a life beyond regret?

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dave Ferguson is founding and lead pastor of Chicago’s Community Christian Church, a multisite missional community considered one of the most influential churches in America. Dave is also the visionary for the international church-planting movement New-Thing and president of the Exponential Conference. Dave and his wife, Sue, have three children and live in Naperville, Illinois.
 
Jon Ferguson is founding and teaching pastor of Community Christian Church and movement leader for NewThing. He is currently helping to plant a Community campus in the Lincoln Park neighborhood of Chicago. He and his wife, Lisa, have two children. Brothers Dave and Jon are the coauthors of several books, including Finding Your Way Back to God.

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Preface

It’s going to be okay.

Soon enough, we’ll have some bold things to say to you. But we want to start this book with a gentle, reassuring whisper. And what we want to whisper is this: It’s going to be okay.

If you’ve gone to the trouble to pick up (or download) this book called Starting Over: Your Life Beyond Regrets, then we’re pretty sure it’s because an incident, or a series of incidents, is weighing on you and you’re unhappy. Something went on in your past that hurts every time you think of it. The idea of starting over sounds incredibly desirable to you, but you’re not sure it’s possible in your case. And do you want to risk the possibility of more disappointment, more heartache?

If you’re feeling this way, we’re sorry. And we want you to know it’s going to be okay.

While you’re going through your painful regret experience, you’re far from alone. Researchers say that children as young as nine express regret. Everybody you know who is out of grade school with developed mental faculties has experienced regret and is probably experiencing some of it right now. Regret is an unavoidable consequence of living in this world.

Not surprisingly, the human race has learned a lesson or two about regret along the way. Sages have opined about it. Older generations have passed down wisdom to younger generations on this topic. Artists have produced arresting portrayals of regret. Psychologists have investigated it clinically. The Bible teaches about it directly and indirectly in countless ways.

And now we offer you Starting Over. Here, you’ll find a clear and practical synthesis of the most important truths that Scripture, science, and story can teach us about beginning again after we’ve made a mistake or something has gone wrong in our lives. If there’s a formula for returning the dawn to our lives, this is it.

The two of us are brothers, and we wrote every bit of this book together. But just so you know, starting with chapter 1, we’ll be writing from the perspective of “I,” referring to Dave. That’s merely for the sake of simplicity. Both of us are speaking to you all the way through.

We are pastors who have not only endured our own regrets, as you have, but have also listened to literally thousands of people tell us about their regrets. An old phrase describes pastors as those who have “the cure of souls” in their care. We have a God-given burden to help the members of our church find the cure for the aches within them. What we’ve learned from helping them to start over, and starting over ourselves, we now want to share with you via the pages of this book.

So right now we’re asking, trust us just a little. Enough to keep reading to see if we can teach you something that will help you start over. Ignore your fear, silence your doubt, and place a bet on the hope you have within you that maybe, just maybe, life can begin anew for you.

The fact is, starting over is not an out-of-reach dream.

It’s the way to live your life beyond regrets.


Chapter 1 - The Sorry Cycle
 
Check out these regrets anonymously posted online:
 
• I regret marrying my husband three weeks ago. I should have called it off before I walked down the aisle. I am twenty-three and just haven’t had the time to learn to love myself yet.
 
• My biggest regret, one that plagues me in my waking moments and some sleeping moments, is that when I was given the opportunity to go to USC for screenwriting I didn’t take the chance.
 
• I regret not telling people how he hurt me. Now, if he is hurting other people, it’s my fault.
 
This stuff is gut wrenching.
 
And oh so familiar.
 
Regret is a universal emotion. We all make wrong or foolish choices, or something or someone does something hurtful to us, and we regret it. Sometimes we even start regretting a decision before we make it—because we’re so sure the consequences are going to disappoint us!
 
Some people have bigger regrets or dwell on their regrets more than others do, but everybody has them. So don’t feel alone if you look back on some episodes of embarrassing boneheadedness or epic nastiness in your past and wish you could do it again differently.
 
I wrote this book to help you and many others deal with regrets and start over again. I wrote it for those of us who have ruined relationships, lost jobs, or failed when given golden opportunities. It is for us if we have spent a night in jail, rejected good advice, or hurt somebody we cared about. This is a book for all of us who have regrets of any type burdening our souls and aren’t sure how to face the future.
 
Truthfully, it’s for every one of us.
 
I bet your mind is already simmering with thoughts of your own regrets. They might be minor regrets that you can dismiss from your head whenever you want or major regrets that are painful and crippling and ever present to you. Maybe you even have a mega regret that you try to suppress beneath the surface of your consciousness. It feels like holding down an underwater volcano, doesn’t it? Exhausting.
 
Whatever the magnitude of your regret, and whatever the cause, I have a word of hope for you:
This is not the end. You don’t have to stay stuck in regret.
 
Diagnosis: Regret Paralysis
 
Let me tell you how I came to write this book. It started with an observation Jon and I made shortly after the release of our previous book, Finding Your Way Back to God.
 
In that book we described a series of five awakenings that people go through
if they feel they have become distant from God and are finding their way back.
 
1. Awakening to longing—“There’s got to be more.”
2. Awakening to regret—“I wish I could start over.”
3. Awakening to help—“I can’t do this on my own.”
4. Awakening to love—“God loves me deeply after all.”
5. Awakening to life—“Now this is living!”
 
In our conversations with people who had read the book, we were pleased
that what we had written resonated with so many people. But we noticed something curious: many of the people we talked to experienced the Awakening to Regret but then got stuck there.
 
For example, one woman in her midthirties told us, “I wish I could startover after my divorce—I
really do. But you have no idea how the breakup has affected the way I feel about myself. How lonely I am. What big financial trouble I’m in today. Not to mention the loss of my hopes for having children, which was my biggest dream. Honestly, I don’t really see God as caring about me or having anything much good left for me.”
 
Jon and I can’t remember which of us first coined the term, but somewhere
along the way we started using the phrase Sorry Cycle to describe what people
meant when they said things like this. They were sorry about what happened
and felt sorry for themselves, but they just couldn’t seem to get beyond that. Essentially
they were going from longing to regret, back to longing then regret, in
an endless cycle of repetition.
 
They were stuck in their regrets.
 
Paralyzed.
 
And miserable because of it.
 
Divorce, abuse, addiction, bankruptcy, the loss of dreams, and other...

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Verlag
Multnomah
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1601426127
ISBN 13 
9781601426123
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
MULTNOMAH
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/75020/multnomah-publishers-inc/

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