David Bryan

RETIREMENT WITHOUT TEARS is a Step-By-Step Guide for a Blissful retirement. This book is a masterpiece for anyone who desires to retire without tears and regrets. It is an intellectual work that takes a holistic look at guiding every worker from active working years to the inevitable season of retirement.

Times of peace, times of war, the people involved will no doubt be shaped around those events. What one child may live each day may be a fantasy to another, and what one child can only imagine is a reality to another. The path one takes is a reflection of themselves, and the journey will mold them into the people they become by the end of their travels. Tread your path, and never look back.

Life goes on. From birth, to childhood, to adulthood, to old age and death, the cycle continues onward. As life is created, it is quickly taken away. At any moment, a life will come to an end. But at the same time it ends, one may start anew. From the beginning of time to its inevitable end, the cycle of life will continue, by any means necessary.

This is an innovative investigation of the puzzling animal imagery found in three 2nd-century BCE texts: the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85-90), the Testament of Naphtali and Daniel 7. It urges that a sense of cultural change is required to understand this well-known imagery, and argues in particular that the mentality underlying the kosher legislation played a significant, even if unconscious, role in the imagination of the various authors. A reading of the Animal Apocalypse is offered which argues that the author utilized the unclean precisely because they represent for him the forces of chaos set in opposition to God. Bryan acknowledges that the bizarre creatures of T. Naph. 5 and Daniel 7 belong to a different kind of imagery (Mischwesen), but argues that awareness of the influence of the kosher mentality opens up new explanations. As mixed creatures, they represent a radical break with order. They are an intense form of unclean creature, and those whom they represent are perceived to be living embodiments of the powers of chaos.

This book explores a sequence of important questions about Jesus that have relevance to our own faith journeys; Where did Jesus start from? What did he meet on the way, both in the annual journey with his family to Jerusalem for the Passover and also in his inner spiritual journey? How did these encounters shape his life, activity and message? To help readers with these questions, 'ground-level insights' are offered, both from recent advances in the historical Jesus studies and from the author's own research visits to Israel-Palestine. Part of the author's aim is to show, in a respectful but honest way, that there is plenty of evidence in the Gospels that Jesus himself grew and developed in his own life journey. At each step of the way, he considers how this relates to Christian discipleship, particularly in relation to our attitudes to those who are strangers.