The Power of Small Honest Choices with Meg Tuohey on Living Your HeartPrint in Everyday Life

NY Weekly Staff on April 10, 2026

By: Rachel Monroe

Personal growth often gets framed as something dramatic. A turning point. A breakthrough. A sudden transformation that changes everything.

Meg Tuohey sees it differently.

In her book HeartPrint: Unlock the Wisdom of You, the path back to authenticity does not begin with a life overhaul. It begins with a question. A simple one that people can ask themselves in ordinary moments throughout the day.

Is the next action I take moving me closer to the life I truly want?

For Meg, that small pause can quietly reshape how someone lives.

What Living Your HeartPrint Really Means

The idea of a HeartPrint might sound abstract at first. But Meg describes it in practical terms.

Living in alignment with your HeartPrint means making decisions that reflect the life and relationships you genuinely want to build.

Sometimes that process is simple.

“It can be as straightforward as asking yourself whether the action you are about to take will move you toward the life you dream of,” Meg explains.

Other times, the answer becomes more complicated.

Recognizing that a decision does not align with your deeper values may require adjusting habits, relationships, or expectations.

That kind of honesty can feel uncomfortable at first.

But it also creates clarity.

Instead of reacting to life on autopilot, people begin responding with intention.

The 10 Percent Shift

Meg is not asking readers to transform overnight. In fact, she intentionally avoids framing personal growth as a dramatic reinvention.

Her hope for readers is surprisingly modest.

“I wish every reader would be moved by this book by ten percent,” she says.

Ten percent more authentic.

Ten percent are kinder to themselves.

Ten percent braver about showing up as who they really are.

Those small adjustments may sound minor, but over time they create meaningful change.

A person who makes slightly more honest choices each day gradually builds a life that feels more aligned with their values.

The shift may not be visible immediately.

But internally, it can feel significant.

When the Inner World Matches the Outer Life

One of the central ideas behind HeartPrint is the connection between inner alignment and emotional well-being.

Meg believes people experience a deeper sense of fulfillment when their internal values match their external lives.

“When your inner world matches your lived experience, you gain access to contentment and satisfaction,” she explains.

That alignment creates a sense of pride in how someone is living.

It also provides emotional resilience.

Positive feelings such as satisfaction and purpose act as protective factors. They make it easier for people to explore their identity, pursue meaningful work, and shape the legacy they want to leave behind.

Instead of feeling pulled in conflicting directions, life begins to feel more coherent.

Writing With Real People in Mind

While working on HeartPrint, Meg often imagined specific people sitting across from her as she wrote.

But the audience shifted depending on the chapter.

Sometimes she imagined speaking to members of her community who had participated in her programs. Other moments felt more personal.

“There were chapters where I imagined my grandchildren reading it one day,” she says.

In other sections, she found herself writing directly to her past self.

That shifting perspective helped the book maintain a deeply human tone. It feels less like a lecture and more like a conversation with someone who understands the complexity of being a person in the modern world.

The result is a book that speaks to multiple generations at once.

Some readers may approach it looking for guidance. Others may simply find comfort in recognizing familiar emotional experiences.

The Relationship We Have With Ourselves

A recurring theme in Meg’s work is the idea that the most important relationship someone has is the one they maintain with themselves.

Many people spend years trying to meet external expectations without noticing how they speak to themselves internally.

Are they encouraging? Curious? Supportive?

Or critical and impatient?

HeartPrint encourages readers to cultivate a kinder internal dialogue. Not by ignoring mistakes or challenges, but by approaching them with curiosity rather than judgment.

That shift changes how people interpret setbacks.

Instead of seeing a mistake as proof of failure, they begin viewing it as information that can guide future choices.

Over time, that mindset builds trust in one’s own voice.

A Story That May Continue

Although HeartPrint stands on its own, Meg believes the story behind it may not be finished.

The character Ellie still holds stories that have yet to be told.

“Ellie showed us who she is, but there are parts of her life we did not fully explore,” Meg says.

Future books could delve deeper into Ellie’s relationships, including her dynamic with her husband, Joe. Meg is also intrigued by the idea of exploring Ellie’s family history through the lives of her parents and grandparents.

Those additional stories could reveal how generational experiences shape the way people understand themselves.

For now, those possibilities remain ideas waiting to unfold.

But Meg admits she is hopeful the journey will continue.

Expanding the Conversation

More than anything, Meg sees HeartPrint as the beginning of a larger conversation.

A conversation about identity, intuition, and the courage required to live honestly.

She hopes the book opens doors for readers to explore their own inner landscape with more curiosity and patience.

And she hopes it encourages a simple but powerful habit.

Pause. Ask the question. Notice the answer.

Because the path back to authenticity rarely appears through dramatic revelations.

More often, it emerges through a series of small decisions that gradually bring a person closer to the life they were meant to live.

And according to Meg, that journey begins with learning to listen.

You can find Meg Tuohey’s book HeartPrint: Unlock the Wisdom of You on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, offering insights for those interested in self-discovery.

The New Case for Staying: Why Love = Commitment Arrives at Exactly the Right Time

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

There is a particular fatigue in the air around modern love. Not heartbreak exactly, though there is plenty of that. Not cynicism either, at least not in its purest form. It is something more ambient and more contemporary: the exhaustion of endless access, endless signaling, endless ambiguity.

People can reach each other at all hours and still fail to arrive. They can text with fluency and remain emotionally illiterate. They can speak of chemistry with near-religious conviction and yet seem terrified by steadiness.

Into that atmosphere comes Dior Amore’s Love = Commitment, a book that refuses the drama of romantic confusion and instead argues, with unusual clarity, for something almost unfashionable: intention.

The provocation at the center of the book is disarmingly simple. Love, Amore insists, is not merely a feeling to be experienced; it is a decision to be practiced. The book returns to this idea again and again, treating commitment not as a grim burden or an antiquated ideal, but as the active proof of love itself. It is an argument that runs counter to a culture trained to confuse immediacy with depth and intensity with durability.

What makes “Love = Commitment” feel timely is not just its message but the world it speaks back to. This is a book written for readers who have grown suspicious of the spectacle of romance. It recognizes the seductions of casualness, the emotional costs of vagueness, and the psychic toll of trying to build a life on intermittent attention. The book explicitly positions intentional dating as a countercultural act in an era of convenience, disposability, and mixed signals. That framing gives the book its charge. It is not offering a mood. It is offering a correction.

Amore writes from a vantage point that is both professional and personal. In the book’s front matter and author section, she identifies herself as a relationship strategist, professional matchmaker, wedding officiant, and founder of Dior Amore Love, someone whose work centers on helping individuals and couples build “intentional, emotionally grounded love” before vows are ever exchanged. That breadth matters.

The book does not read like theory from a distance. It carries the cadence of someone who has spent time near real people making real mistakes, asking real questions, and trying, imperfectly, to love better.

And the word “better” is essential here. The book is not especially interested in romance as ornament. It is interested in romance as infrastructure.

Again and again, Amore shifts the conversation away from attraction alone and toward what sustains a life: self-love, healing, boundaries, communication, accountability, emotional safety, consistency, shared values, resilience. The table of contents itself reads almost like a manifesto against relational passivity, moving from “Love Is Not a Feeling,  It’s a Decision” to “Self-Love Is the First Commitment,” then on to healing, intentional dating, choosing the right partner, trust, communication, daily practice, legacy, sacred partnership, and love that survives adversity. The architecture is revealing. This is not a book that treats romance as an isolated emotional event. It treats love as a system.

That systems-based approach may be exactly why the book will resonate with readers weary of advice that either over-spiritualizes love or trivializes it. Amore’s worldview is more disciplined than that. She seems less interested in asking whether someone feels butterflies than whether they can tell the truth, stay present during conflict, respect a boundary, regulate themselves under pressure, and build something that does not collapse the first time life becomes inconvenient.

In one of the book’s recurring ideas, lasting love is shown not as a theatrical feeling but as visible consistency, emotional presence, and daily repair.

That is where the book’s appeal deepens. Love = Commitment is not merely speaking to singles hoping to find a partner. It is speaking to people who sense that romance has been oversold as instinct and undersold as practice. It is speaking to couples who want more than attraction and to marriages that aim not merely to endure, but to thrive. It is speaking, too, to readers who have come to understand that a relationship is never only about two people; it radiates outward into family, home, emotional inheritance, and community.

The book explicitly imagines love as a legacy, something passed forward, something capable of changing not only hearts but households and entire communities when rooted in respect, self-awareness, and purpose.

This is the boldest thing about Amore’s project: she wants to restore moral seriousness to the subject of love without draining it of warmth. In lesser hands, that could become preachy.

Here, it feels urgent. The book’s language suggests that commitment is not a reduction of romance but its maturation. Not a lowering of excitement, but a raising of standards. Not a denial of feeling, but a refusal to let feeling do work it cannot sustain.

In that sense, Love = Commitment arrives as both guide and rebuke. It asks readers to reconsider what they have been calling love, what they have been rewarding, and what they have been tolerating. It offers a vision of partnership built less on fantasy than on fitness: the emotional fitness to communicate, the spiritual fitness to align, the ethical fitness to keep showing up.

That vision may not flatter every reader, and it is not meant to. But it may steady many of them. Because Amore understands something the culture often forgets: people do not only want passion. They want peace. They want clarity. They want to know that love can be more than a brief atmosphere of mutual desire. They want to know if it can survive ordinary life. They want to know if it can be built.

And this book’s answer, delivered with conviction, is yes, available now.

Karina Colon Webber’s New Memoir Arrives with The Quiet Force of a Life

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

By: Jason Gerber

By the time most people reach adulthood, they have learned at least one form of silence so well that it can pass as virtue. Silence as politeness. Silence as strength. Silence as maturity. Silence is what you do when you are trying not to make the situation worse, even when it has already made you smaller.

A culture that claims to adore “authenticity” is, in practice, rarely generous with it. We praise vulnerability until it becomes inconvenient. We celebrate survival as long as it is tidy, inspirational, and brief. We make art out of other people’s pain, then ask them to compress it into a lesson with a bow.

Silent Love, Unsilenced Life: A Journey From Hidden Heartbreak to Owning My Joy, the new book by Karina Colon Webber, challenges that arrangement. It presents itself, instead, as a document of lived reckoning and hard-won clarity. The title alone is an argument. “Silent love” implies affection performed through endurance, devotion measured by what you tolerate, tenderness that asks for your quiet in exchange for your belonging. “Unsilenced life” suggests a different covenant: the one where you refuse to keep paying for love with your own erasure.

A Memoir About What Silence Costs

Memoir is having a moment, and not always for the best reasons. In the age of constant disclosure, the genre can become a marketplace: the trauma essay, the viral confession, the conversion narrative engineered to scan cleanly on a screen. But there is another tradition, older and more demanding, in which memoir is not performance. It is an excavation. It is a writer returning to the scenes that shaped her, not to sensationalize them, but to name them. Naming, in this tradition, is not catharsis. It is power.

A Title That Reads Like a Manifesto

It is difficult to overstate how much work a title does now. A reader scrolling through an online bookstore is not browsing in the old sense. She is triaging. She is asking, in an instant: Will this book see me? Will it use me? Will it heal me, or will it sell me back my pain with prettier adjectives?

Silent Love, Unsilenced Life answers quickly, and with teeth. It does not romanticize silence. It does not offer it as an act of elegance. It positions silence as a condition that can be inherited, imposed, performed, and finally interrupted. That interruption, to borrow the book’s language, is not merely about speaking. It is about living differently.

The phrase “owning my joy” is especially pointed. It suggests that joy is not accidental. It is not dependent on someone else’s behavior. It is not postponed until life becomes kinder. It is owned, which implies boundaries. It implies agency. It implies, in the most practical sense, that a person can stop negotiating with the parts of herself that want to be free.

What Readers Are Hungry For Now

There is a reason books like this are finding their audience. We are living through an era of exhausted intimacy. People are burned out on relationships that require constant interpretation. Burned out on emotional labor that is framed as romance. Burned out on the cultural script that calls chaos passion and calls peace boring.

A serious memoir about reclaiming joy is, implicitly, a rebuttal to that script.

It tells the truth many readers already suspect: that stability can be thrilling when you have lived without it. That calm can be erotic when you have grown used to bracing. That love, in its most adult form, is not just chemistry. It is care, shown repeatedly, without theatrics.

If Webber’s book meets professional readers with real force, it will be because it refuses to confuse intensity with intimacy.

If you are a reader who has lived through heartbreak, or secrecy, or the subtle erosion of self that happens when you keep making yourself smaller, Webber’s book is positioned as a companion with sharp edges and a steady voice. It does not promise that healing is pretty. It suggests that healing is honest. It suggests, too, that joy is not naïve. Joy is disciplined.

That is a powerful message to put into the world, and an even more powerful one to live.

Where to Start

Readers drawn to memoirs that center on survival without sensationalism, faith without performance, and love without self-erasure will find themselves at home here. Silent Love, Unsilenced Life is the kind of book that does not ask for your pity. It asks for your attention. It asks you to examine what you have normalized, and to consider what happens when a life stops being managed for other people’s comfort.

You do not need spoilers to understand the invitation. The invitation is the title: Stop calling silence love. Start living unsilenced.

Silent Love, Unsilenced Life: A Journey from Hidden Heartbreak to Owning My Joy by Karina Colon Webber is available wherever books are sold.

Beyond “Good Job”: Kelly D. Culver on How to Praise Your Child for True Self-Esteem

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

By: Jason Gerber

Most parents want to encourage their children. We often reach for a simple phrase like “good job” to show our support. While this comes from a loving place, these two words are very general. They do not tell a child what they did well. They do not connect the praise to a specific effort or quality. Lasting self-esteem is not built on broad approval. It is built on the child’s understanding of their own strengths and efforts. To build a strong inner foundation, we must learn to praise in a way that is meaningful, specific, and truthful.

Specific praise helps a child form a clear picture of their abilities. Instead of saying “good job,” you might say, “I saw how carefully you stacked those blocks.” This statement does several important things. It shows the child you are paying close attention. It names the specific action they took: “stacking carefully.” It separates the praise from the person. You are not just saying they are good. You are saying their action had value. This teaches the child that their efforts and choices lead to positive outcomes.

Another powerful method is to praise the process, not just the result. Children often feel pressure to achieve a perfect outcome. When we only praise the finished product, we can accidentally create a fear of failure. Try praising the strategy, persistence, or improvement you see. You could say, “You worked on that math problem for a long time and never gave up. That is called perseverance.” Or, “Your first draft had three sentences. Now you have written a whole paragraph. That is amazing growth.” This type of praise makes the child feel strong and capable, even when a task is difficult.

Affirmations are one of the most direct tools for building a child’s sense of self. This is the core idea behind the new book Words Are Powerful: Blessings For Your Little One by Kelly Culver. Affirmations go beyond praising a single action. They describe the child’s inherent being. They use phrases like “You are a creative thinker” or “You have a kind heart.” When a child hears these words repeatedly, they begin to believe them as fundamental truths. This builds a resilient self-esteem that is not dependent on daily performance.

Author and educator Kelly Culver designed her book for this exact purpose. Words Are Powerful provides parents with the language of specific, loving affirmation. It moves from the generic to the deeply personal. Instead of a vague “good job,” the book offers clear statements such as “You are strong,” “You are clever,” and “You are a good friend.” Kelly Culver spent over twenty-five years teaching young children. She saw how this kind of language helped students understand their own worth in a lasting way.

You can combine specific praise with affirming language throughout your day. Notice when your child shows a positive character trait. Then, connect it to their identity. For example, if they share a toy, you could say, “That was such a generous action. You are a thoughtful person.” If they try something new, say, “You are so courageous for trying that new food.” This method links their behavior to their core self. It helps them see that their actions reflect who they are. This builds a moral and emotional identity they can be proud of.

It is also important to be sincere. Children have a keen sense for false praise. Look for genuine moments of effort, kindness, or improvement. Your authentic recognition will mean much more than constant, empty phrases. The goal is not to praise every single thing. The goal is to offer meaningful recognition when you see true growth or good character. This makes your words powerful and trustworthy. Your child will learn to trust their own sense of accomplishment because you have mirrored it back to them honestly.

Shifting your language may feel awkward at first. That is completely normal. Start by replacing one general phrase per day with a specific observation. Instead of “Good drawing,” try “I love how you used so many colors in your picture.” This small change starts a powerful habit. Over time, you will find it becomes natural. You will be building a detailed map of your child’s strengths for them to navigate by. This is the greatest gift you can give. You are giving them the words to understand and believe in themselves.

For parents seeking a beautiful and ready-made guide to this transformative language, the book Words Are Powerful: Blessings For Your Little One by Kelly D. Culver is an essential resource. To begin using these powerful strategies in your home, find this important book available for purchase now on Amazon and at all major book retailers.

Dr. Everest John’s Rockets, Prayer, and the Future of Meaning: The Fictional Odyssey of Ibn Battuta from Tangier to Mars

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

There is a familiar story that gets told every time a rocket launches. The camera angles do their work, the countdown builds suspense, and the narration slips into a near-religious tone. Humanity is “reaching for the stars.” We are “becoming a multi-planet species.” We are “taking the next step.”

It is the mythology of progress, and it is persuasive.

From Tangier to Mars: The Fictional Odyssey of Ibn Battuta does something rare in contemporary speculative fiction. It enters that mythology, enjoys its drama, and then asks the question most people avoid because it complicates the mood.

What happens to meaning when technology outpaces the human soul?

Dr. Everest John’s novel is built on an irresistible premise: Ibn Battuta awakens in the year 2050, meets Elon Musk, and travels to Mars. That is the headline hook. But the deeper hook, the one that keeps readers turning pages, is the book’s willingness to treat Mars not as an engineering trophy but as a moral environment.

Mars, here, is not just where humans go. It is what humans become under pressure.

A Medieval Traveler as a Witness to Our Future

There is a reason Ibn Battuta is the right choice for this story. He is not merely a famous traveler. He is a figure shaped by a worldview in which the spiritual dimension of life is not optional, not ornamental, not relegated to private preference. For someone like him, journeying is not only movement across geography. It is exposure to other communities’ moral codes, sacred rituals, and the invisible agreements that hold societies together.

Now place that sensibility into a future that tends to treat spirituality as an awkward topic, something to keep out of boardrooms and mission briefings. The tension writes itself, and John exploits it with purpose.

The novel becomes a long confrontation between two ways of understanding “the next horizon.” One way is technical: build the ship, build the habitat, build the supply chain. The other way is existential: decide what kind of people will live in that habitat, what rules will govern them, what stories will hold them together when Earth is a distant dot.

This is where the book becomes more than a clever mash-up. It becomes a narrative argument.

Colonization as a Spiritual Problem

Space colonization is often framed as an escape. Earth is too crowded, too chaotic, too exhausted. Mars becomes the blank slate. A clean start.

John refuses that fantasy. His story suggests that Mars will not erase human conflict. It will intensify it. Because on Mars, everything becomes sharper. Every disagreement is amplified by the stakes. Every social fracture becomes dangerous. Even ordinary questions, the ones we handle casually on Earth, turn urgent under isolation.

What happens when a group shares a mission but not a shared moral language? What happens when crisis forces decisions about leadership, discipline, intimacy, and survival? What happens when people arrive with different beliefs and no common ritual for grief, fear, or hope?

The book circles these questions in ways that make the reader uneasy, and that is the point. It turns the future into a mirror, asking whether our confidence is earned or merely rehearsed.

The result is a kind of suspense that does not depend only on plot twists. The suspense comes from the reader’s awareness that the hardest part of colonization is not oxygen. It is human nature.

The Bold Turn Toward Prophecy

Then the novel makes a move that sets it apart from the bulk of modern sci-fi. It brings prophecy into the conversation.

Not prophecy as cheap prediction, and not prophecy as genre decoration, but prophecy as a literary device that forces readers to confront the limits of purely technical thinking. The narrative introduces the idea of “The Book of Mars Prophecies,” framed as a symbolic scripture of cosmic insight. It suggests that the future may require a new kind of witness, not a prophet performing miracles, but a witness who translates awe into language.

This is a risky move, especially for a modern audience trained to be suspicious of religious tone in fiction. John handles it by leaning into wonder, not a sermon. He treats cosmic vision as an extension of travel, as if journeying far enough inevitably brings you to the edge where facts meet mystery.

That is a powerful concept, and it lingers. Because it reframes the Mars dream, it suggests that leaving Earth is not only a triumph of engineering. It is also a confrontation with the question humans keep trying to outrun: what are we for?

The Novel’s Emotional Edge

Underneath the big ideas, the book keeps returning to something personal. Dislocation. The shock of waking in a world that is not yours. The loneliness of being out of time. The longing for home, even when home is impossible to return to.

These are not futuristic problems. They are human problems. The book uses its grand premise to sharpen them. It gives the reader a way to feel the future, not just imagine it.

And that, ultimately, is what makes it compelling. It does not treat the future as a spectacle. It treats it as a place where the human heart has to survive.

From Tangier to Mars: The Fictional Odyssey of Ibn Battuta is a novel about what gets packed for the journey. Not supplies or schematics, but the values, stories, and moral frameworks that determine whether a community survives its distance from home. That is a question worth sitting with long after the final page.

From Brokenness to Ministry and the Story Behind Out of Control

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

Meet the man behind the message!

Every book has a story behind it. But few books emerge from the kind of pain and redemption that shaped Nathan Wilson’s life and ministry. The author of Out of Control did not write from an ivory tower of academic detachment. He wrote from the trenches of personal suffering, from the valley of despair, and from the mountaintop of God’s healing grace.

Nathan Wilson is a teacher, writer, and counselor dedicated to helping believers overcome life’s toughest setbacks and live righteously. But the road to that calling was anything but smooth. It was paved with heartaches, depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and grief. It was a road that nearly destroyed him. And it was a road that ultimately led him straight into the arms of a loving God.

Early Life and Influences

Nathan Wilson grew up under the watchful eye of his father, Kenneth Wilson. In the dedication of Out of Control, Nathan reveals the profound impact his father had on his life. He writes, “I would like to dedicate this book to my dad, Kenneth Wilson, who took the time to teach me how to live out the Christian life. His wisdom and guidance continue to shape the person I strive to be each day.”

Kenneth Wilson was not just a father in name. He was a father in practice. He took time with his son. He taught him what it meant to follow Christ. He modeled integrity and hard work. Two quotes from Kenneth appear in the dedication, revealing the kind of wisdom he passed down. One says, “If it is worth doing, do it right the first time.” The other says, “Believing in something is important, but it is what you do with what you believe that changes people.”

These words would stay with Nathan through every trial he would later face. They became anchors in the storms of his life.

The Dark Years

Despite his godly upbringing, Nathan Wilson’s life took a dark turn. For many years, he suffered deeply. He experienced heartaches that left him wounded. He battled depression that stole his joy. He fought anxiety that robbed his peace. He struggled with substance abuse that threatened to destroy him. He carried grief that weighed heavier than any physical load.

These were not minor struggles. They were life-threatening battles. They were the kind of fights that make a person want to give up completely. And Nathan admits that without the many mentors God placed along his journey, he would have given up long ago.

In the book’s acknowledgement section, he thanks his wife, Brenda Wilson, for her continual encouragement to finish this book. Her support, along with the support of countless others, kept him going when everything inside him wanted to stop.

The Turning Point

Something changed during those years of suffering. In the depths of his pain, Nathan Wilson encountered God in a new way. Not through religious rituals. Not through mere head knowledge. But through the holy scriptures. God showed him grace when he deserved judgment. God showed him love when he felt unlovable. God showed him healing when he thought he would never be whole.

This encounter with divine mercy transformed everything. Nathan realized that his suffering was not meaningless. It was preparing him for something greater. It was equipping him to help others who walked the same dark roads he had walked.

The apostle Paul wrote that God comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves received from God. This became the pattern of Nathan Wilson’s life. He received comfort. Now he would give it away.

Education and Calling

With a renewed sense of purpose, Nathan Wilson pursued theological education. He wanted to understand the scriptures deeply. He wanted to be equipped to help others properly. He earned his Master of Divinity degree, studying the Bible, theology, and pastoral care at an advanced level.

But he did not stop there. Nathan continues to pursue greater knowledge and effectiveness in ministry. He is currently working toward a Doctorate in Ministry, seeking to deepen his understanding and sharpen his skills for the sake of those he serves.

Education alone does not make a minister. But education, combined with personal suffering and divine healing, creates a powerful combination. Nathan Wilson does not just know about God from books. He knows God from the fire. He has been tested and proven. He has walked through the valley and come out the other side.

Ministry and Counseling

Since his healing, Nathan Wilson has devoted himself to one primary mission: discipling and counseling people to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. He has walked alongside countless individuals who struggle with the same issues that once threatened to destroy him. He has offered them hope. He has pointed them to scripture. He has shown them that no one is beyond God’s reach.

His counseling approach flows from personal experience and biblical truth. He understands that people do not need mere behavior modification. They need a heart transformation. They need to encounter the same grace that found him in his darkest moments. They need to know that their stories are not over.

This ministry of discipleship and counseling became the foundation for his writing. Nathan realized that he could reach even more people through books than through personal counseling alone. He could put into words the truths that had saved his own life. He could offer readers the same hope that had pulled him from the pit.

The Writing of Out of Control

Out of Control did not emerge from a comfortable season of life. It emerged from the trenches. Nathan wrote this book because he saw something happening in the 21st century that alarmed him. He saw society spiraling downward. He saw fear taking hold of hearts and minds. He saw people drowning in sin without understanding why.

He also saw that the church was offering incomplete solutions. Preachers focused on behavior modification while ignoring the root problem. They talked about the last six commandments while neglecting the first four. They tried to fix actions without addressing hearts.

Nathan wrote the book to correct this imbalance. He took readers back to the Garden of Eden. He showed them where sin really started. He revealed Satan’s ancient tactics. He traced the pattern of sin through generations. And then he pointed to the only real remedy: the fear of God and the grace found in Jesus Christ.

The book is scholarly enough for serious students of scripture. It is practical enough for people struggling with real-life issues. It is hopeful enough for those who feel they have sinned too much to ever be forgiven. It is exactly the book Nathan Wilson needed during his own dark years. And now it is the book he offers to a hurting world.

Personal Life

Nathan Wilson is married to Brenda Wilson, the woman he credits with continually encouraging him to finish this book. Her support has been instrumental in his ministry and writing. Their partnership reflects the kind of faithful commitment that Nathan writes about in his work.

He also remains deeply connected to the mentors who guided him along the way. He acknowledges that without many of them, he would have given up long ago. This humility and gratitude mark his character. He does not pretend to be a self-made man. He knows that every step of his journey was made possible by others who poured into his life.

A Word from Nathan Wilson

If you were to ask Nathan Wilson why he wrote Out of Control, he would likely tell you something like this. He would say that he wrote it for people who feel stuck. He wrote it for people who keep falling into the same sins no matter how hard they try. He wrote it for people who are tired of fig leaves that never last. He wrote it for people who need to know that God is still walking through the garden, still calling their names, still asking, “Where are you?”

He would tell you that his own story proves no one is beyond hope. If God could reach him in the depths of depression, addiction, and despair, God can reach anyone. If God could heal his wounds and give him a new purpose, God can do the same for you.

The Legacy Continues

Nathan Wilson continues to teach, write, counsel, and disciple. He continues to pursue his Doctorate in Ministry. He continues to point people to the saving grace of Jesus Christ. His story is not finished. His work is not done.

But one thing is already clear. Nathan Wilson is not just an author who wrote a book. He is a witness who survived the fire and came out with something to say. He is a living example of the very truths he proclaims. He is proof that the God of the Garden is still in the business of transforming lives.

Nathan Wilson’s journey from depression and addiction to healing and ministry gives him a unique voice of authority and compassion. His book Out of Control flows from personal experience and deep biblical study. Discover the story behind the book and let his testimony encourage your own walk with God.

The Courage to Disappoint Others: Setting Boundaries as an Act of Self-Love by Richard Davies

NY Weekly Staff on April 8, 2026

By Jason Gerber

For many of us, the word “no” feels dangerous. It feels like a rejection, a rupture, a sign of failure. We say yes to avoid conflict, to be seen as helpful, to maintain a certain image. We say yes out of guilt, obligation, or a deep-seated fear that our worth depends on our usefulness to others. But every time we say yes when we mean no, we say no to ourselves. We say no to our energy, our time, our peace, and our truth. Learning to set boundaries is not an act of rebellion or selfishness. It is a fundamental act of self-love and the very foundation of an authentic life.

Think of your energy and attention as precious resources. You have a finite amount. If you give them away to every request and demand without discretion, you will have nothing left for what truly matters to you. You will feel drained, resentful, and disconnected from your own goals and desires. A boundary is simply a conscious decision about where you end, and another person begins. It is a statement that your needs are valid and deserve protection. Without these clear lines, your identity becomes blurred, and you lose sight of your own essence. This connection between boundaries and self-knowledge is a vital theme in the book BEcoming: The Essence of Your True Self by Richard Davies.

The first step is a mindset shift. You must believe that your well-being is important. Setting a boundary is not about rejecting another person. It is about honoring yourself. It is a commitment to show up as your best, most present self, which you cannot do if you are constantly depleted. The temporary discomfort of disappointing someone is far better than the long-term resentment of betraying yourself. This is a courageous act of choosing authenticity over approval. As Richard Davies emphasizes in his work, true freedom begins when you release the need for everyone to like your choices.

Knowing this is one thing. Doing it is another. Here is how to start with kindness and clarity. You do not need a lengthy justification. A simple, clear statement is often most effective. You can use phrases like, “Thank you for thinking of me, but I cannot commit to that right now.” Or, “I need to focus on my prior commitments, so I will have to pass.” You can also say, “Let me check my schedule and get back to you,” which gives you time to consider your true capacity. The key is to be firm and polite. You are not responsible for managing the other person’s reaction. You are only responsible for communicating your truth with respect.

For closer relationships, you may add a brief reason to maintain the connection. “I value our time together, but I need some quiet evenings to recharge my energy.” Or, “I want to give this project my full attention, so I cannot take on anything else at the moment.” Notice these statements focus on your need, not the other person’s flaw. This is not about them. It is about your capacity. This reflects the core philosophy of BEcoming, which teaches that living your truth is a daily practice of inner alignment.

You will feel uneasy at first. Your heart may race. That is normal. It is the feeling of breaking an old pattern and choosing a new, healthier one. With each respectful “no,” you build self-trust. You affirm that your feelings are important. You create the space necessary to say a full, joyful “yes” to the things that truly align with your values and purpose. Boundaries are not walls. They are the gates that allow you to choose what enters your life with intention.

This practice is essential for anyone on the path described in BEcoming: The Essence of Your True Self. You cannot live authentically if you are constantly molding yourself to the expectations of others. Setting boundaries is how you carve out the psychological space to discover and honor who you truly are. It is how you move from performing to living.

Begin with a small, low-stakes situation. Protect one hour of your weekend. Decline one optional request. Each time, you are not just saying no to someone else. You are saying a profound and loving yes to yourself.

The Courage to Disappoint Others: Setting Boundaries as an Act of Self-Love by Richard Davies

Photo Courtesy: Richard Davies

To learn more about building a life of authentic choice and courageous self-honor, read BEcoming: The Essence of Your True Self by Richard Davies. This book provides essential guidance for establishing the inner clarity and strength needed to live by your own values.

How Beverly Crawford’s ‘Effervescent Faith’ Redefines Spiritual Resilience

NY Weekly Staff on April 7, 2026

Many people think of faith as a shield. It is something you hold up to block the blows of life. Others describe it as an anchor, a heavy weight that keeps you steady in a storm. These ideas are not wrong, but they are incomplete. They paint a picture of faith as something static, a defensive tool.

What if faith is not just a shield or an anchor, but an active, lifting force? In her book Effervescent Faith, author Beverly Crawford introduces a new model for spiritual resilience. She moves beyond cliché and articulates a dynamic vision of faith that challenges long-held assumptions about how we endure suffering.

The Limitation of Passive Endurance

Traditional views of Christian suffering often focus on endurance. The goal becomes gritting your teeth, bearing the pain, and waiting for the trial to pass. This mindset can unintentionally reduce faith to a form of spiritual waiting. The believer is portrayed as a passive recipient of hardship, hoping to simply survive it.

Beverly Crawford’s life story reveals the flaw in this passive model. When faced with childhood trauma, betrayal, and the death of her son, mere endurance was not enough. Survival required something more active. Her experience demanded a faith that did more than just help her withstand the pressure; it needed to actively lift her from it. This realization is the seed of her theology of effervescence.

Introducing the Effervescent Faith Model

Crawford discovers a perfect metaphor in a simple antacid tablet. Drop it in water, and it sinks. This is the moment of crisis, the impact of tragedy. But then, something inherent to the tablet reacts. It begins to fizz and bubble, creating an upward force that carries it back to the surface.

This is effervescent faith. It is not about avoiding the sink to the bottom. It is about possessing a divine inner quality that reacts to the darkness and generates an upward lift. In Effervescent Faith, Beverly Crawford does not just describe this idea; she demonstrates it through her personal narrative. Each challenge, each plunge into despair, is met with this reactive, bubbling force of trust, prayer, and scripture that restores her to light and air.

How This Model Illuminates Scripture

This effervescent framework makes sense of biblical stories in a fresh way. Consider the story of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, which Crawford references. Thrown into a fiery furnace, they were not merely enduring. Their active, defiant trust in God created a supernatural result, a divine “bubbling up” that led to their preservation and promotion.

The Psalms are full of this movement, where cries of despair from the depths actively transform into declarations of praise from a place of deliverance. Crawford’s model shows that biblical resilience is rarely passive waiting; it is an active collaboration with God, where our trust triggers His lifting power. Her work as a practical theologian lies in mapping this spiritual principle onto the geography of human suffering, making doctrine tangible.

A Call to Dynamic Belief

Beverly Crawford’s authority comes from her lived experience as a theologian of the heart. She has not just studied these concepts; she has lived the experiment. Her book, Effervescent Faith, is the compelling report of her findings. It argues that true spiritual resilience is kinetic. It is faith in motion, faith that reacts to the chemistry of grief and generates hope.

This model encourages believers to move beyond a narrative of victimhood to one of active overcoming. It reframes the question from “How can I endure this?” to “What is within me, through Christ, that will rise to this?”

Beverly Crawford provides a fresh perspective on understanding strength in suffering. For anyone seeking a faith that is alive and active, her work offers a meaningful starting point for rethinking how resilience and belief intersect.

Donna Stovall Highlights the Importance of Time and Inherited Strength in Her Novel The Waiting Place

NY Weekly Staff on April 5, 2026

Seldom do we ever wonder that survival and internal strength are virtues passed hand to hand to us in our DNA.  The Waiting Place, Donna Stovall’s novel, awakens these epiphanies in our souls. It spans the beginning of humanity, the Middle Passage, and the contemporary world.

Rather than treating history as a backdrop, Stovall approaches it as a way to transform readers into multiple timelines. The novel unfolds through three women whose lives span centuries yet are linked by blood and memory. Even though they belong to different eras, they share a drive to keep life moving forward despite obstacles.

The first woman of the story, Lucy, comes from a time before language existed. Her chapters show that she identifies things only by the work they perform. She knows only hunger, fear, birth, danger, and the need to protect her newborn. Stovall uses this narrative to place the reader within a consciousness that revolves solely around survival.

The novel’s second woman lives in a world that is brutally over-documented in literature. This story paints the brutal image of slavery and being ripped away from your home. One of the strongest points of this narrative is that Stovall resorts to familiar historical framing. This unnamed young woman is introduced by showing how she used to live and enjoy her life before falling into the clutches of slavers. When she is captured and forced into enslavement, she remains brave and steadfast even though she is facing an unimaginable trauma.

In the passages written from the enslaved woman’s perspective, The Waiting Place interrogates that inner strength cannot be stripped away, even under systematic violence. Survival in brutal situations is less about the body’s endurance and more about the preservation of self.

The third woman, the “Woman of Now,” initially appears to occupy an entirely different moral and material universe. She is wealthy, powerful, and highly competent. She is a successful businesswoman who understands leverage, negotiation, and control. She inhabits a modern world that promises autonomy and fulfillment, yet she is haunted by an incompletion she cannot rationalize.

Her journey revolves around how she uncovers the histories embedded in her ancestral home and begins to understand that her restlessness stems from inherited memory. The past, Stovall suggests, does not vanish simply because conditions improve. It is inherent and unearths at one point.

The vision behind the novel is that the “waiting place” is never confined to one physical location. It is the space between danger and safety, between loss and survival, between knowing and remembering. Readers can see how their strength is passed down to the next generation.

Stovall’s writing reflects her background as an artist. Her writing is conversational, humorous, and raw, reflecting a real human voice. In addition, what distinguishes The Waiting Place is its refusal to flatten womanhood into a single heroic arc. Stovall shows that strength appears different in a Stone Age wilderness than it does in a slave ship or a boardroom. Yet the impulse behind it is to gain protection, continuity, care.

The novel ultimately argues that modern identity is not self-made, no matter how individualistic the culture claims to be. Every life stands on accumulated acts of courage, many of them unrecorded, many of them performed by women whose names history never bothered to keep.

The Waiting Place encourages readers to reconsider their relationship with time and their inherited stories. In doing so, it reframes survival as a gift passed from one generation to another.

The novel can be purchased on Amazon and other online platforms.

Rev. Steven Golden’s Map Back From Rock Bottom

NY Weekly Staff on April 2, 2026

Rev. Steven Golden’s book reveals what he found on the other side of hardship.

Not everyone who hits rock bottom talks about it. Rev. Steven Golden, Doctor of Divinity, did more than talk. He lived through the financial strain, the relationships that quietly fell apart, and the feeling that no matter how hard he tried, nothing was working. Most people in that place stay there. He chose to find a way out and then wrote it all down. He lived inside it long enough to know exactly how heavy it gets.

What he turned toward, in the depths of his own hardship, was an ancient question dressed in modern clothes: what if the problem is not what is happening to you, but what is happening inside you? That question, and the painstaking, lived answer he found, is the substance of his new book, Your True Human Power: Master the Golden Zone.

“What you are seeking is seeking you. But it cannot find you if you are not there to meet it.”

The book is a substantial thing, fifteen chapters moving from the history of spiritual thought across eight eras of human civilization through to a suite of daily practices the author insists can be applied in under a minute.

It opens with a foreword by Robert G. Allen, the bestselling author of Creating Wealth and Multiple Streams of Income, who writes with visible personal conviction about the spiritual foundation beneath all genuine material success. Allen’s involvement is not decorative. It signals something important: this is a book that takes seriously both the spiritual and the practical, and refuses to let either dimension flatten the other.

The organizing argument of Rev. Steven Golden, Doctor of Divinity, is drawn from the New Thought philosophical tradition, a lineage that runs from ancient Greek philosophy through nineteenth-century American thinkers and into the contemporary consciousness movement. The central principle: the human mind does not merely reflect reality. It actively generates it. Thoughts, he argues, are energetic transmissions. The internal dialogue we carry, the beliefs we hold about ourselves and the world, uthe emotional frequencies we habitually inhabit, all of these are broadcasting signals into what quantum physicists call the field, a vibrational substrate underlying physical reality, which responds by organizing corresponding experiences and circumstances.

But the book’s real power is not in its scientific scaffolding. It is in the texture of how Rev. Steven Golden, Doctor of Divinity, writes about the inner life. Chapter 3, on the inner voice and internal dialogue, is as good a piece of writing on the subject of self-talk as you will find in the genre. Practical without being reductive. Spiritually grounded without being preachy. He describes the internal dialogue not as background noise but as a radio transmission, active and consequential, shaping the receiver’s reality with every broadcast. The chapter on heart and mind coherence goes further, arguing that the alignment between thought and genuine feeling is the engine of manifestation, and that the split between what we say we believe and what we actually feel is the most common reason our best intentions fail to materialize.

For New Yorkers carrying the particular weight of a city that asks everything of you, this book offers something quietly radical: the suggestion that the most important work is not the work you are already doing, but the work happening inside the person doing it. Rev. Steven Golden, Doctor of Divinity, has been to the bottom. The map he brought back is worth reading.

Your True Human Power: Master the Golden Zone is available now on Amazon. Visit myhumanpower.com.

Author Bio

Rev. Steven Golden’s Map Back From Rock Bottom

Photo Courtesy: Rev. Steven Golden

Rev. Steven Golden, Doctor of Divinity, is a Certified Spiritual Practitioner, Ordained Minister, and author of Your True Human Power: Master the Golden Zone. A graduate of the Emerson Theological Institute, he has spent decades exploring the connection between spiritual philosophy and human potential. He also served as North American director for Third Rock Adventures, leading high-altitude Himalayan trekking expeditions. Today, his platform at myhumanpower.com reaches thousands of readers across cultures and continents. His work draws from ancient wisdom and modern science to help people access the power they already carry within them.

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