Secrets of the Magic Valley and Hagerman's Remarkable Horse

By Dellanna O'Brien

Will support year one of the two-year Beyond Belief emphasis. Explore awesome works of God found in the Bible as well as present day miracles. It will challenge you to go beyond the ordinary in your relationship with God and others

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1563092867
• ISBN13: 9781563092862
• Release Date: December 2002
• Publisher: Black Canyon Communications
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.

Customer Reviews

The Power of Presence

In this collection of stories, Dellanna O'Brien develops a scenario of the power and value of just being present with someone during a crisis time. The stories she presents focus on cross-cultural encounters from her personal experiences and those of others. She presents a pespective of Christian faith across cultural boundaries that is not domineering and coercive, but warmly acceptring and focused on sharing the basic values of humnity present in Delalanna's understanding of the Good News. I have known Dellanna O'Brien since 1971. I first met her when she and her husband Bill were in the United States for a period after some years of creative cross-cultural work in Bali, in Indonesia. Bill was a musician and worked with Christian churches in Bali to enable them to develop Christian worship and expression to their Hindu culture of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Bill and Dellanna worked with these churches to develop their indigenous Balinese classical ballet and drama to express the themes of biblical faith. They were back in the US for some years working with young cross-cultural Christian workers, assisting to train them in insights and methods of learning cultural and contextualizing their life and faith. In this recent book, Dellanna tells the story of unusual and unexpected events in cross-cultural encounters around the worlds. These are stories of the triumph of universal values over ethnic cultural limitations. Even today, with so much more awareness of the world at large, and so much of the world's cultures now moving into all regions and nations, many westerners are sadly ethno-centric, supposing that their way of thinking and doing is somehow universal, somehow beyond the common human limitations of time, history and ethnic arrogance. These stories remind us how the character and love of God calls us all to rise above our cultural preferences and prejudices. These unusual events Dellanna records challenge us to answer the call to a universal identity that can share and communicate on an equal basis with people of other cultures. The events she recounts here focus on relationships, and remind us how we all need trusting friendships and how we can best be a friend to someone different from us. These stories reinforce the focus that the O'Briens and hundreds of other trainers and teachers have given years to: to help others learn the value of an approach of learning and discovering together from a perspective of committed faith that reaches out to serve, rather than to judge. We see here the value of just being there when needed, just loving and telling our story, so others can hear in the way they can understand, offering an option to those who are seeking.