Unhitching from the Crazy Train ― Finding Rest in a World You Can't Control

YOU HAVE A PICTURE OF HOW LIFE SHOULD GO. We all do. The dream job. Close friendships. Loving, grateful children. A perfect marriage. But more often than not, life doesn’t go according to plan. So we corral and control,determined to make our picture come true. Our emotional, spiritual, and even physical well being are taken for a crazy ride as our very sanity becomes dependent on how close reality matches our expectations. No wonder we’re exhausted. We’re hitched to the crazy train and we want to get off. But how?“Come to Me,” Jesus says, “and I will give you rest.”Join counselor and teacher Julie Sparkman as she explores Jesus’ gentle yet costly invitation to true rest.

Julie Sparkman brings fun and practical insights to serious topics such as applying the Gospel to otherwise crazy everyday relationships. A full-time certified counselor by the American Association of Christian Counselors, Sparkman is the co-founder and executive director of Restore Ministries, a counseling service for men, women, children/teens, and college students, as well as the author of Unhitching From the Crazy Train, which is based on a small group curriculum by the same name. She calls the greater Birmingham, Alabama area home, where she has been instrumental in creating and training pastoral care teams.

Jennifer Phillips is the gifted author of 30 Days of Hope for Adoptive Parents and the widely praised book, Bringing Lucy Home. She is an adoptive parent to a loving little girl she and her husband affectionately named Lucy. Actively involved in discipling women, she is also a volunteer at her children's school. A psychology graduate of Samford University (Birmingham, Alabama), she served as executive director for the local Sav-A-Life, a national network of crisis pregnancy centers. Phillips and her husband, Brian, served in Australia with University Impact, a franchise of Campus Outreach but now call Birmingham, Alabama home. For more information, visit her blog at jenniferphillipsblog.com.