Should I Wait in Faith or Step Out in Faith?, Smith M. Blaine

To find a new job? To launch a new career? To seek a serious relationship? To go ahead and marry, in spite of your fears? To move to a new home or a different city? To find a new church? To take on a challenging ministry in the church you attend? To embrace a major educational goal and see it through? To take up tennis and stick with it? To learn guitar and become a competent player?

IS IT TIME FOR YOU TO REINVENT YOURSELF?

If so, you'll find abundant help for doing so in this book. God has so designed human life, M. Blaine Smith explains, that we need a major change from time to time, to keep adventure alive and to realize our highest potential. Smith looks carefully at how we can grow more alert to the new directions God wants us to take and then find the courage to follow them, in the face of a host of fears that can hold us back. He takes a keen look at certain issues that often keep us as Christians from pursuing God's best options for us. Smith writes compassionately and with great enthusiasm for life's new beginnings, explaining how they can bring unspeakable benefits to you and to those your life touches.

This book will help you to:

• Grow more alert to God's guidance
• Recognize when God is prompting you to take a major new direction with your life
• Find the courage to reinvent yourself
• Conquer fears of failure, success, and commitment
• Let go of a comfortable situation that's holding you back from God's best
• Deal with impostor feelings that often accompany a major life change
• Understand when you're locked in to past expectations or promises and when you're not
• Overcome regret over past decisions that now seem misguided
• View your limitations as strengths

Most of all, this book will fire your passion to reinvent yourself when the time is right. Blaine Smith's counsel will help you identify that new adventure God has for you, move beyond your fears and pursue it successfully

RELATION TO OTHER M. BLAINE SMITH BOOKS: Some material from other books Blaine Smith has written is included or reworked in this one. Much of this book's content is fresh, though, and anything included from a past book is woven carefully into this book's discussion.

The emotionally intelligent person is far less susceptible. She understands her feelings well, and handles them adeptly. He also knows how to draw many benefits-even from his negative emotions. In this warm and insightful book, Blaine Smith looks carefully at what emotional intelligence is, and why it's vital for the Christian. He explains how you can achieve it, offering much practical counsel, and drawing on many fascinating biblical and personal examples. He looks at issues common to everyone, and at many unique to us as believers.

Emotional Intelligence for the Christian will help you to:

• Avoid emotional freefalls into anger, despair, anxiety
• Understand anger's pitfalls as well as its positive role
• Grow more optimistic about your future, and gain greater motivation for steps of faith
• Better prepare yourself emotionally for solving problems and recognizing God's guidance
• Understand when your desires signal God's will for you
• Appreciate your unique temperament and its benefits
• More effectively love and serve others for Christ

The goal of growing wiser emotionally is highly achievable for any of us who take it seriously. This book will give you both the inspiration and practical guidance to make it happen

In this classic on Christian self-image, Blaine Smith stresses the importance of cherishing your personal distinctiveness - as a gift of God, and a vital indication of what he wants you to do with your life. And he looks carefully at what this means. He considers how self-esteem and humility should fit together for the Christian. And he gives you solid biblical reasons to view your personality, talents and gifts, physical features, and special circumstances positively and appreciatively. His accent is on encouragement and re-inventing the way you see yourself as a child of God.

This book will help you to:

• Appreciate your personality, talents and physical features as God's handiwork
• Be more alert to golden opportunities to invest your life
• Understand how self-esteem and humility fit together in the Christian life
• Break through "self-consistency" to achieve a genuinely more positive, healthy self-concept
• Base your identity not just on one talent or characteristic, but on your unique combination of features
• Break the habit of comparing yourself unfavorably to others

Ralph T. Mattson comments: "More people are likely to be blunted in their growth by poor perceptions of their individual worth than by inflated egos. Innumerable Christians have embarked on their life's calling with profound misunderstanding of their uniqueness and self-worth, thereby missing many of the delights of full-orbed Christian living.

"One of a Kind is a welcome corrective. It encourages us to abandon self-depreciation for a realistic biblical view of ourselves without false positivism. In dealing with the subjects of humility, self-esteem, ideals, body image, and personality, Blaine Smith covers the most commonly expressed concerns people are likely to have about themselves."

Ralph T. Mattson, author of Finding a Job That You Can Love

Blaine Smith's One of a Kind (originally published in 1984 by InterVarsity Press) is re-issued by SilverCrest Books.