In Store Author Event with Kristen Strong

If you've ever been tempted to put a sign in your front yard advertising for new friends, scream or sob in frustration over a "friend's" hot and cold behavior, or cringe at the memory of awkward friendship encounters, you can trust Kristen Strong's decades of experience at regularly relocating and remaking friends to provide both solid hope and practical direction to try again to find the friends you need.In Desperate Woman Seeks Friends, Kristen Strong offers her two decades of experience as a regularly relocating military spouse and one decade as a settled civilian to address head on the crisis facing women today in startling numbers: an acute loneliness and isolation due to a lack of friends and community.Often, social media will give a band-aid for loneliness, but looking to social media to be your only source of friendship is like relying on breadcrumbs as a steady diet for dinner: it won't nourish or satisfy. Unless some of those online connections turn into real-life ones, they're no substitute for in-person friendships.Research shows friends are as important for our overall welfare as healthy eating habits and a good night's sleep, and Kristen gives you a game plan for getting your friendship groove back. Chapters include:

• Boundaries are our friends and our friends' friends
• What you can expect will K*ll friendships
• I love my friend to pieces, but I don't love her views on ____________
• When a friendship ends without your say-so
• Rejection sucks, but don't let it suck you down
• Your top-notch tool for building your friendships
• Making friends by opening up
• Your Friend who never fails in friendships

It's not just you. Making friends is hard! But it's not impossible. Through tell-it-like-it-is talk and vulnerable stories, Kristen wants to help you be a good friend to others and to yourself through principles and practices that give life to your friendships. And she wants to show you that while friends may fail you, your Friend Jesus never will. You're meant to have lasting friendships that feed your heart and soul—you are not the exception.

Kristen Strong, is the author of Girl Meets Change and When Change Finds You, and the compiler of the 90-day devotional, Praying Through Loneliness. She writes as a friend walking alongside you in your lonely season to a more helpful, hopeful destination. She loves sharing laughs, long talks, and meaningful stories with family and friends while holding a cup of strong black tea. She and her US Air Force veteran husband, David, have three beloved adult children. Together this military family zigzagged across the country (and one ocean) several times before settling in Colorado Springs, Colorado. You can find her at kristenstrong.com, DaySpring’s (in)courage, and on Instagram @kristenstrong.

Pattie Reitz is a proud military chaplain’s wife and mother of two grown daughters. She loves reading, coffee, writing, and conversation with friends. She is currently teaching composition at Butler Community College. While Pattie has followed Kristen's writing for a dozen years and even published her guest post on a military wives' ministry blog years ago, it was Kristen who invited Pattie to contribute to her collection of devotionals Praying Through Loneliness which was published in November. This event will be the first time they have met in real life.

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