Book Details Title: Finding Grace: A true story about losing your way in life…and finding it again Author: Donna VanLiere Format: Hardcover Print Number of Pages: 224 Summary: Finding Grace is the powerful, often humorous, and deeply moving story of one woman’s journey of broken dreams. It is the story of how a painful legacy of the past is confronted and met with peace. This book is for anyone who has struggled to understand why our desires—even the simplest ones—are sometimes denied or who has questioned where God is when we need him most. This story is about one woman’s unlikely road to motherhood. Finally, it’s a book about the “undeserved gift which is life itself.” It’s the story of “Finding Grace.” Price: $21.95 Author Bio: Donna VanLiere is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Christmas Hope series and Angels of Morgan Hill. She lives in Franklin, Tennessee with her husband and three children.

Finding Grace: A True Story About Losing Your Way In Life…And Finding It Again

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I recently saw an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” in which a young boy is left an orphan after his mother is killed by a stray land mine from a long forgotten war on a seemingly uninhabited planet. It’s a senseless, shocking death that the Starship crew didn’t see coming. Then, an energy life form remaining on the planet attempts to make amends to the orphaned boy by creating a comfortingly familiar, but illusionary, “home” for him, a home that includes a recreation of his mother. The Starship crew is presented with the difficult task of convincing the alien (and the boy) that this illusionary world is ultimately not preferable to the cold, hard reality of life–and death.

I was reminded of that episode as I sat down to write this review of Finding Grace. After all, who among us hasn’t wished for God to put our life back to how it was; back before the pain, the loss, the confusion? Who hasn’t felt anger that He didn’t spare us from the hurt in the first place? And yet we instinctively know that reality, with all it’s hardships, is better for us in the long run than the most comforting fantasy world.

But we constantly ignore this. Over and over again we believe that if we only plan more carefully next time, if only we pick the right road, if only we read all the important signs, we’ll end up exactly where we wanted, feeling refreshed and ahead of schedule. Certainly life would be simpler if it was a straight, smooth road, with detailed maps and clear visibility. But it isn’t. It’s filled with sharp curves, rocky cliffs, roadblocks, detours, and lots and lots of fog. Our perfect life plans get sideswiped by other blinded and lost travelers. Death. Betrayal. Heartache. Illness. Shattered dreams. We break down and think we can no longer go on. And that probably there really aren’t any destinations worth getting to anyway.

Finding Grace is the true story of Donna VanLiere’s journey of being hit early on by one of those hidden land mines of life, and how she stumbled around in the fog trying to find her way back on the path she lost. It’s about how over the years she began to notice the light which illuminated a different path through the fog, and that this path, though not the one she had envisioned, was in fact better than the one she was trying to find.

“Perhaps you’ll recognize part of your own life,” VanLiere writes about her book, and I did. I found myself seeing a lot of my own life’s struggles echoing her frustrations and disappointments, and the same glimpses of God’s grace touching me as it did her. VanLiere describes God’s grace as a undeserved gift that we’re often unaware of having received. In Finding Grace she shows us the times she received God’s grace without recognizing it as such until years later. By doing so, it helped me to realize times when I, too, received this gift.

One of the most difficult Christian concepts to put into practice is letting go of self-made plans and allowing God to take control. At times we even believe that our goals are better than God’s will for us; that if we let Him “take the wheel” we’ll end up miserable and unhappy and doing something we absolutely hate. I’ve fallen into that trap myself. Whenever someone tells me to put my life into God’s hands and follow His path for me, I think to myself, “If I go down God’s path, I’ll end up a missionary in Botswana.” Now, you have to understand that I live in the same small town I grew up in. I’ve never really wanted to leave. My husband and I bought a house half a block from my parents. I’ve known most of my neighbors my entire life; some of my ancestors knew their ancestors. So the worst imaginable thing for me would be to end up in some far-flung country surrounded by strangers speaking a bizarre language–who I’m supposed to teach about God!

But why do I think God’s will for my life involves such a drastic change? Why do I think His goals for me can only be worse than the happy dreams I have for myself? In Finding Grace VanLiere shows us that God’s special plans for us include peace and hope, not misery and drudgery. He wants us to thrive and be joyful, and have a life of love, inspiration, and grace. This doesn’t mean he’ll create a familiar, illusionary world of empty bliss around us. And it doesn’t mean we won’t have pain and sorrow. VanLiere suggests God sometimes lets us get derailed off our path so we can finally see the one He’s laid out for us. God has a higher purpose for us than we can even envision for ourselves. It’s our journey to discover that purpose by choosing to follow His path, not ours. And that the crashes and injuries and wrong choices we suffer along the way doesn’t change His destination for us.

Finding Grace is a well written, poignant, yet humorous look back on a life spent searching for answers to all the wrong questions and discovering God’s grace in the process. It’s an entertaining, thought-provoking book that will make you examine the path your own life is on. At least it certainly did that for me. I absolutely loved Finding Grace and am recommending it to all my family and friends. When I finished it, I immediately wanted to read it again. I’d never read anything by Donna VanLiere, but now I want to read everything she’s written. I can’t give any higher praise than this.

For more information about Donna VanLiere and her books, visit http://www.donnavanliere.com
To order Finding Grace, click here.
For more books by Donna VanLiere, visit her online store.

Ebook Details Title: Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC Author: Max Pinner Author Bio: Max Pinner is a freelance writer and a PC technician. File Size: 1.75MB Unzipped. Format: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) Number of Pages: Part 1: 143 pages; Part 2: 51 pages Subject: Fix common PC problems yourself. Price: $47+
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A couple years ago my computer decided one day not to boot up due to a corrupted registry. Of course, I didn’t know it was due to a corrupted registry at first; I had no idea such a thing even existed. All I knew was the computer wouldn’t boot. I ended up researching online (using my parents’ computer) and diagnosing and fixing the problem myself. Unfortunately, I had to roll back to a much earlier version of the registry, which undid months of changes to my computer settings. If I’d had Max Pinner’s Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC before that incident, not only would I have spent less time figuring out–and fixing–the problem, I would have had a recent backup of the registry to roll back to, thus saving me the nuisance of having all my settings go back to how I didn’t want them.

That’s because the first thing Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC has you do is set up your Maintenance Toolkit, a collection of free (or cheap) software programs designed to help prevent problems or, when a problem occurs, help diagnose and correct the underlying cause. And the first item in Pinner’s Toolkit is a registry backup program. You can bet I downloaded and ran it immediately! That suggestion alone let me know Max Pinner knew what he was talking about. (If only I’d known about the importance of backing up your registry a couple years ago…)

Next in the suggested Toolkit is a program designed to clean up your registry, which I also downloaded and ran. It removed lots of old junk cluttering up my registry. Other items in the Toolkit include anti-virus and anti-spyware programs (which I already had), as well as a disk cleanup program used to delete “electronic fluff and rubbish files.” After running this last program my laptop boots up a little faster.

Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC provides the solutions to other common Windows XP and Vista problems, such as blue screens, error messages, program freezes, computer crashes, and internet connection issues. Simple Fixes also touches on hardware problems with monitors, mice, drives, and keyboards. Max Pinner doesn’t claim his solutions will work every time for every computer, but that his solutions will usually fix 7 or 8 out of every 10 PC problems. I believe him, just due to my own experiences fixing my “sick PCs” with simple solutions.

For example, several years ago when I was still running a 486 computer, it decided one day not to boot up. In a panic, I immediately called a local computer tech company to set up an appointment to bring it in. The receptionist calmly asked me if I had a recovery disk. Um, why yes, I did. She told me to insert it into the floppy drive and try to boot the computer again. I did so and voilà, it worked! I was back in business in a matter of minutes. That receptionist saved me a costly service call and a day or two without my computer.

Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC is just like that receptionist–a calm voice offering a simple solution that saves you lost time and countless dollars. Pinner walks you through each step in diagnosing and fixing a problem. If it works, you just saved yourself a tech support call. If none of the solutions work, you’ll have a better understanding of the underlying problem when you talk to your technician. (And the more you can explain to your tech the less likely he/she is to treat you like a noob. That’s worth it right there.) Pinner tells you when you need to stop and call a technician, or, as the case may be, when it’s more cost-effective to just junk a component (like a troublesome printer) and buy a new one.

If you purchase Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC, I suggest you print it out (at least the sections dealing with computer access problems) because obviously if you can’t boot your computer, you can’t read the ebook to figure out why! Perhaps Pinner could market a print version…

Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC is $47, which I think is a bit pricey even though the information contained within is excellent. I’d market it for around $27, with a print version for $47. However, the current price is still well worth it if you’re having continuous troubles with your computer. (And if my laptop decides like all my other computers to just not boot up one day, I’d be willing to pay that and more to fix it…)

I also think perhaps the manual could have been condensed somewhat by consolidating sections that have the same or similar instructions. However, it isn’t meant to be read straight through like I read it, but by skipping to whatever section is relevant to your particular computer problem, so you likely won’t notice the repetitiveness of instructions as I did.

The instructions themselves are non-techie, easy to follow, and include some levity to help keep you calm when you feel like panicking. Cartoons sprinkled throughout the manual provide more humor, though I admit I didn’t quite get all the punch lines. Perhaps I just don’t understand Australian humor. (Max Pinner is Australian.) The Australian component also accounts for the alternate spelling of words in the text (which most people likely wouldn’t notice, but it’s my curse that I do) such as color/colour, practice/practise, etc.

Bottom line: Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC is a great manual for anyone with a PC computer to have on hand, especially those who aren’t technically-minded. If you have a PC running Windows, it will eventually blue screen and crash. That’s a given. Get Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC before that happens!

For more information and to purchase, visit Simple Fixes For Your Sick PC