A Fierce Love: One Woman’s Courageous Journey to Save Her Marriage
A Fierce Love: One Woman’s Courageous Journey to Save Her Marriage book cover

A Fierce Love: One Woman’s Courageous Journey to Save Her Marriage

Paperback – June 27, 2017

by
Price
$16.99
Format
Paperback
Pages
240
Publisher
Zondervan
Publication Date
ISBN-13
978-0310347538
Dimensions
5.5 x 0.63 x 8.4 inches
Weight
7.7 ounces

Description

Review Shauna’s courageous fight for God’s will to prevail in her marriage is beautiful beyond words. A Fierce Love is an amazing reminder that, with his strength, we can still choose to show love . . . even with a broken heart. -- Lysa TerKeur st, New York Times bestselling author;When author Shauna Shanks got the worst news a wife could get---that her husband wanted a divorce---she pleaded with God, “Please just give me one thing I can focus on! Just one word.” He gave her two: Endure. Hope. I urge you to read this remarkable story of one wife who decided to lean completely on the Lord and to not give up, but to fight for her marriage. You will not be disappointed. -- Chris tine Caine, founder, A 21 and Propel WomenThis is so much more than the story of a faithful wife wooing her way-ward husband back to their marriage. It is the story of a faithful God wooing his wayward people back to his side. If you’ve ever wandered or been wounded by someone who has, you will find great comfort and encouragement in all the words Shauna shares. No matter what the imposing mountain in front of you looks like---marriage, money, sickness, or shame---you will learn from her example how God reveals himself through life’s impossible situations. -- Amy Lively, author, How to Love Your Neighbor Without Being WeirdShauna Shanks takes us on a journey of what it’s like to be faced with an impossible situation, and to either do what makes sense in the eyes of the world and those around us, or have the audacious faith that God calls on us to have. A Fierce Love is a must read for everyone who has ever had their faith put to the test in a big way. -- Chad Veach, lead pastor, Zoe Church in Los Angeles, CaliforniaWow. Sometimes relationship miracles are the most amazing miracles of all. This is one of those miracle stories we need to know about. At its core, this is a story about a person’s relationship with God as it is tested and navigated through one of the most severe crucibles of life. There were times in Shauna’s story where I could hardly believe she was getting skewered and crushed by these emotional attacks again and again. And yet in the midst of those situations, she shares her vivid examples of God opening her eyes and directing her to dig in and use the principles of the Word of God and overcome by faith, even when it seems she is hanging on by a thread emotionally. I really love the battle-tested and practical examples she shares. For this reason, this book is a road map of sorts, but one that shows not just the way through to a miracle, but also the pit- falls of despair when one strays off the path---and how to course-correct by God’s mercy and grace. We need to know stories like this exist---especially in this hour, when so many hearts are used to giving up and growing hard and cold. This kind of story restores hope in the power of God’s love to overcome obstacles and shows love is worth fighting for, even when the situation seems to drag on without any reason for hope. God never leaves your side, and his Word and his Spirit will both work in and with you to strengthen you to see these amazing miracles happen. -- Timothy Jorgensen, pastor; author, Spirit Life Training About the Author Shauna Shanks is a wife, mother, and entrepreneur. She started Smallfolk, a health food café, out of her passion for health and fitness. She graduated from Christ for the Nations Institute in Dallas, Texas, with a focus on world missions. Shauna and her husband, Micah, who is a police officer, have been married for more than a decade, and they live with their three boys on an Ohio farm. www.shaunashanks.com

Features & Highlights

  • Love is easy to give when you are getting it back. Are we still called to God’s plan of how to love when we are getting none in return? Shauna Shanks’s brave journey through obedience reveals the outcome of when we dare to follow God’s ludicrous outline for love as described in 1 Corinthians 13.
  • Wrecked with news of her husband’s affair and his request for a divorce, Shauna finds herself urgently faced with a decision. Does she give up and divorce her husband and move on, or does she try to fight for her marriage? The former choice seems to contradict God’s plan for how to love, such as “love never gives up,” “love is patient,” and “love is kind.”
  • Taking God at His word and assuming the love chapter was really meant to be followed literally word by word, she not only finds herself falling in love with her spouse again, but also falling in love with Jesus, which changes everything.
  • First Corinthians 13 presents an audacious, illogical, and irrational context of how to love, meant to be applied to every marital context not just the fairytale marriage. If God’s instructions seem illogical and audacious, you might just expect the same kind of results in return!
  • This book is not air-brushed. It was written in the midst of the author’s deepest trauma, and she purposefully did not edit out her mistakes and failures during that season. This book will resonate with women who do not feel like the picture-perfect Christian woman with the fairytale life and marriage.
  • A Fierce Love
  • is the story of a train wreck and reaching out to God not in the calm but in the chaos and finding hope for the future.

Customer Reviews

Rating Breakdown

★★★★★
60%
(354)
★★★★
25%
(148)
★★★
15%
(89)
★★
7%
(41)
★
-7%
(-42)

Most Helpful Reviews

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Wisdom for marriage in crisis!!

This book practically mirrors what my sister went through last summer...even some of the smaller details were oddly similar. Happily, I can attest that the miraculous transformation Shauna experienced in her marriage by the work of the Spirit is a real thing...I saw it happen with my sister in her marriage as well. God is in the business of healing broken things!! This book speaks candidly and directly, yet with sensitivity and warmth, to the heart of the wife who has dealt with a husbands’ infidelity. I was so grateful for her perspective and just incredibly helpful wisdom on how to proceed through the land mines of ones’ own emotions when faced with a crisis like this.
My sister’s literary journey back to a healed and healthy marriage also included the books ‘Empowered Wives’, ‘Sun Stand Still’, and ‘power of a praying wife’. All of these books have also served to strengthen and empower my (intact and healthy) marriage as well. So you can’t go wrong no matter where you are on your marriage journey.
2 people found this helpful
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This book goes beyond just your average marriage advice book ...

This book goes beyond just your average marriage advice book. It goes to a deeper level of working with your personal relationship with God and how it affect every area of your life. Shauna's openness with her story will touch many people: married , single, divorced, dating.
2 people found this helpful
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A Must Read

Powerful story of this woman's journey. I am blessed to call her my friend!
2 people found this helpful
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Insightful, Deeply Spiritual

This is a memoir of one Christian wife's marriage and how she saved it. Shanks begins her book with Acknowledgments of those who have made her book possible. She spreads her content in 30 chapters and ends with Notes for the sources she used for the book. Each of her chapters begins with a Bible verse that fits with the chapter. In addition to being a wife and mother, Shanks is an entrepreneur. She started a health food cafe called Smallfolk.

This book was quite what I expected. Shanks get quite personal about her struggles with her husband. She doesn't gloss over his failings or her own. As her book (and the experience of too many of us shows), there is nothing like a bad or challenging marriage to surface our moral and spiritual failings. While the author is quite pro-marriage, she places no guilt trip on those who can't make their marriages work but choose divorce instead. She endorses the Sarah Young devotional, JESUS CALLING, with its questionable theology of relying on feeling and experiences at the expense of Scripture. Shanks claims an intimacy with God that consists, if we can believe her account, of personal communications. She also talks about experiences with dreams and professes having dreams and visions. To be sure, Scripture teaches about the gifts of the Holy Spirit, of which the supernatural is integral. It is just that I grew up in a tradition that has edited out the supernatural, relegating it to the Bible days.

I recommend this book for any woman who wants to save her marriage. I recommend it even for girls and women who are engaged to be married. They can maybe get a stronger start in their marriages. But this book is one-sided, addressed only to wives. Someone needs to write a counterpart book for husbands in challenging marriages. It seems that more wives than husband have motivation plus resources, to fight for their marriages, than husbands do. This needs to change. Maybe the husband of this author can write his book one day? That would be awesome if he would.

I received a complimentary copy of this book through BOOKLOOKBLOGGERS, in exchange for my honest review. I was not required to give a favorable review of this book.
2 people found this helpful
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I loved this book

I loved this book. It was a very easy read and her honesty and transparency made this hard to put down. While she is quick to say her experience is not what everyone else should do, her desire to do what she believed God had told her to do, even though it was difficult, was so inspiring. It strengthened my faith.
2 people found this helpful
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Perfect Love

Such a beautiful story of God's plan coming to fruition. This courageous story is a profound example of His ever-present help in trouble. Shauna continues to worship and pray through the depths of her despair and perseveres against extraordinary circumstances. Perhaps the most amazing part of the story is that in a time where by most human standards, she ought to have been so injured and bitter; she traded those insecurities, anguish and sorrow for a perfect love in the name of Jesus. Such a page-turner too! I couldn't stop reading it.
2 people found this helpful
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It’s a good book, but...

I read this out of curiosity (I hate fiction), and I cannot commend Shauns Shanks enough for her steadfast pursuing of God’s peace through this difficult, heartbreaking time. One issue I have with the book is that, it seems she should have waited a while longer to publish this book since it seems she had not gotten from her husband what she needed: full repentance that actually included him verbalizing and acknowledging the immense pain and torture he caused her and his heart breaking for HER due to this pain he caused her and their kids. I thought perhaps she just wanted to focus the book on her thoughts and feelings, but a couple of years ago I saw an interview she did where she was asked about “the moment” (or some term like that) that her husband realized the error of his ways and wanted to make things better/had his epiphany (something like that), and Shauna said there really wasn’t that kind of moment or anything. It was shocking. My guess would be the mistress decided there was no way she wanted to play mom #2 to his kids and deal with the forever-fallout of her part in the whole affair and ended things with him (not to mention that once the affair came to light, it probably lost its luster to her), so Shauna’s husband had nowhere to go but home, where he subsequently let her do all the work of suffering and rebuilding because it made his major choice to cheat on his wife and kids easier to deal with since she was acting like the guilty party and constantly trying to smooth things over with him. While I know spiritual warfare is a real thing, she seems to open doors of excuses for her husband’s extreme betrayal (It’s not enough to have sex with someone else and tell them you love them, but then you have to tell your wife you never loved her, are not attracted to her, etc??? Just. CRUEL.), and perhaps that’s why she hadn’t gotten the aha! moment from her husband by the time I saw the interview (years after she wrote the book). I would guess she has some resentment about this and can see now other ways she might have contributed to his nothing-to-see-here attitude post-affair that I wish she would’ve talked about - however great their marriage may be now. I hope she writes a follow-up about what this path of faith and forgiveness has looked like since this first book; writing is certainly a gift of hers.
1 people found this helpful
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Inspiring!

Great story for any marriage
1 people found this helpful
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An Excellent Book!!

We live in a world where we find it easy to "bail out" of marriage when the "for better and worse" we vowed to in our vows becomes worse. In this book, Shauna shows that there is a
Higher way. When things became worse in her marriage, she chose to filter every response to her husband through the "Love Filter".
I rarely ever write comments on books I have read, but this one is the cream of the crop.
Just filled with the principle of selfless, sacrificial love that I believe would be a blessing to anyone struggling to love someone in their life who is hard to love. To love as Christ loves- selflessly loving the "unlovable"! An excellent book!
1 people found this helpful
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Absolutely loved this book

Absolutely loved this book!! It inspired me to love deeper. Not only my husband but everyone around me! And to fall deeper in love my God!
1 people found this helpful

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