Marcia Ramsland

Marcia Ramsland must have one of the neatest desks and best-organized homes in the country—which could be intimidating if she weren't soft-spoken and just plain nice. The Organizing Pro (www.organizingpro.com), as she's known, has been working as a professional organizer for more than 20 years, helping residential and commercial clients organize their time, their desks and their lives.
Ramsland is author of a trio of Simplify for Success books for Thomas Nelson, beginning with 2004's Simplify Your Life (50,000 copies sold) and including Simplify Your Time (2006; 20,000 sold) and the upcoming Simplify Your Space (Sept.). All the books have been part of the Women of Faith Lifestyle line; they carry the logo on the back cover and are sold at the weekend conferences that reach 600,000 women annually. Her ideas have been featured in Woman's Day and Better Homes and Gardens. Working with the motto "keep what is working; change what is frustrating," she doesn't aim to make anyone perfect, but hopes to help people get control of their lives and do for themselves what she would do for them as a professional.

This work began for Ramsland when she became a homemaker. After three years of teaching elementary school music classes to 200 students a day, Ramsland was suddenly at home with three children under six years old. "I thought, someone needs to organize this," she says. "Then I realized that person was me. I read 33 books and did not find the answers I needed." So Ramsland created her own organizing methods and began passing those on to others through her work as a professional organizer and through speaking events.
Though there's little faith content in the books (Simplify Your Space includes one Bible verse—Proverbs 14:1—and Simplify Your Life includes a short prayer at the end of each chapter), they are motivated partly by studies Ramsland did in Proverbs. "There are 23 verses in Proverbs on 'the sluggard' and 'the diligent,' " Ramsland says. "I realized this is an issue of lifestyle and not personality or morality. It's possible to have deep faith and have no organization at all, or the other way around."

Simplify Your Space walks the reader through every room in the home, applying Ramsland's CALM approach: "Create a plan, Approach it by sections, Lighten up and let go, and Manage it simply." She provides diagrams and a 10-point checklist for each room, along with decorating ideas from Susan Wells.

Ramsland doesn't see the interest in organizing going away any time soon. "In the mid-'80s, the average person had 10 things a day on their to-do list. Now we have 200 inputs a day."
The next project for Ramsland may be the creation of a three-ring binder for simplifying the holidays.—Lori Smith

Bonnie St. JohnIf it hadn't been for that line-dancing Jesus, Bonnie St. John might never have become an author.St. John, a motivational speaker, was about to deliver her first big speech when she ducked into a bathroom stall to calm her nerves. Just then, a smiling, sandaled Jesus appeared in her mind's eye, and he was line dancing. In the ladies room.St. John nailed the speech. And the vision of a loving Jesus dancing with her through life's crises brought her firmly back to the Christianity of her youth.This is one of the many personal stories she tells in HowStrong Women Pray (FaithWords, Nov.), St. John's fourth book, and her first about faith. The book moves between St. John's own story of rising from a sexually abused child amputee to a Paralympic skiing medalist, Harvard graduate, Rhodes scholar and wife and mother. It also tells the stories of 27 other successful women who, like St. John, bolster their lives with prayer."I asked women what they learned over time about prayer," St. John says. "One thing I heard over and over again was to do less asking for things and be more grateful. It's recognizing you don't have to give God a 'to do' list. God knows what you need and it is really about getting closer to God so that you understand what you are supposed to do, rather than telling God what to do for you."St. John got the idea for the book—what else?—while in prayer. "I was thinking how in the last 10 years I had to deal with so much and how I wouldn't have made it through without praying," she says. "I thought there must be other strong women who feel the same way and who have achieved many things. It was a very personal sense of, 'I would like to know.' "She soon discovered that women as different as the actress Edie Falco and the former First Lady Barbara Bush had one thing in common—prayer, in times of both great stress and great peace. Other praying women in the book include Maya Angelou, Libby Pataki, Kathy Ireland, Marilyn McCoo and Immaculee Ilibagiza.St. John, who will tour 12 cities with the book, says after talking to these women that her own relationship with God has expanded. "I think Susan Taylor puts it really well" in the book, St. John says. "She says prayer is not for God. It doesn't help God at all. Prayer is for us, because it brings us closer to God. It is a simple reaching out. Our prayers may not be answered in the way we want them to be answered, but we are going to get closer to God, and that can't be a bad thing."—Kimberly WinstonGary Zukav

"Each of my books is an experiment, just as my life is an experiment," says Gary Zukav, Oprah guru and bestselling author of four books (as well as four coauthored books), including 1990's mega-hit The Seat of the Soul (Free Press).

Zukav now continues the Soul series—with 4.7 million currently in print—with Soul to Soul: Communications from the Heart (Free Press, Oct.). The subtitle refers both to the questions and answers that structure the book and to its much more personal nature than his previous titles, as Zukav draws heavily on his own life and experiences to answer "soul questions."

"Soul questions are about meaning and about love," Zukav says. "Their answers come from the heart, from the healthiest, most wise and grounded aspects of yourself that you can reach for. The answers will change you. You open, you become more limber and flexible. Your life fills with meaning and your creativity flows."

That certainly describes the arc of Zukav's own life, sketched across the book's passages on power, love, evil, spiritual health, relationships and more. Born in Texas and raised in the Midwest, Zukav went to Harvard and to Vietnam as a Green Beret. He was a self-described sex addict and angry young man. But everything changed with the writing of his first book, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (Bantam, 1984), which won the American Book Award for Science. Since then, he has sought to enrich and enlighten not only his own soul but the souls of all, calling us to become what he calls "Universal Humans."

"A Universal Human is a human that is beyond culture, beyond nation, beyond religion, beyond race, sex, economic circumstance," Zukav says. "A Universal Human is an individual whose allegiance is to life with a capital L first, and all else second."

In the book, Zukav relates stories and experiences from his own life to illuminate the path to becoming a Universal Human. He tells of his time in Vietnam, of his conversations with his adoptive Sioux uncle, of his father's death and funeral and of his own responses to the attacks of September 11. All lives contain the potential for the spiritual development necessary for our survival as a species, he says.

"My life has been amazing, but everyone's life has been amazing," he says. "It did not save me, I saved myself. My life has been amazing because of the potential each of my experiences has offered me to grow, and that is the same reason your life is amazing. That is the wondrous quality of every human life—the potential at each moment to expand beyond your fears and into your love, to choose differently, to create differently."—Kimberly Winston