Someday soon, one of my precious three-year-old twins is going to ask me the question “Mommy, what happened to you when you died?”
Someday they will overhear me telling my story to someone and want to know more about it. They will look at me with their big, innocent eyes and try to make sense of what they’re hearing. It isn’t always easy explaining what happened even to adults, so how am I going to explain it to my kids?
There is so much I want to share with them, so much I want them to know. You see, my story is one of hope and forgiveness and salvation, and of the glorious healing power of God’s presence. It’s the story of what I saw and what I learned when, during a hospital stay, I left my body for nine minutes and went to heaven and stood before God. And it’s the story of how, when I came back to Earth, my life was profoundly and permanently changed— changed down to the very core of my being.
But it is also a story that, for the longest time, I didn’t want to tell.
PARTICULARS OF THE BOOK :
Author: Crystal McVea
Purchase: Barnes & Noble, Amazon and Other
ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND CO-WRITERS:
Crystal Leigh McVea was born in southwest Oklahoma and still lives there today. She is a schoolteacher and has four lovely children. Crystal and her husband Virgil, a US Army veteran, are devout Christians and active in their local church.
Alex Tresniowski is a former human-interest writer at People and has written several books, most notably The Vendetta, which was purchased by Universal Studios and used as a basis for the movie Public Enemies. His most recent book, An Invisible Thread, has spent more than twenty weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
Laura Schroff is a former advertising executive who has helped launch three of the most successful start-ups in Time Inc. history—InStyle, Teen People, and People StyleWatch. Schroff has also worked as the New York Division Manager at People magazine and Associate Publisher at Brides. She lives in New York City.
THE BOOKISH DAME REVIEWS :
I wish I could say that this is a book I found uplifting and convincing in terms of a woman's leaving this life for a brief time to visit the "other side" and to see and experience the Divine. I'm sorry to say, it was a book that felt amateurish, and flat-footed. I was not only left unimpressed, but I was also discouraged and disgusted by some of the content. It concerns and angers me when people seek to lead the public on with stories concocted around a hot item such as an "after life experience," and don't really have the goods.
Most of this book is a hanging out of dirty laundry about the author's background of incest and abuse, and her continuation of self-abuse. It has every form of dysfunction one could place on a pitiful child and family, told in fine detail. This seems to be the focus of the book, much more than the uplifting part about the author's journey to the other side and her visit with spiritual beings with messages to change her life.
I grew so turned off by the many chapters spent disclosing her aberrant life and her own bad/destructive behaviors. So much so, the small bit she does disclose about her time in "heaven" is sullied in my opinion by the surrounding mass of personal (sewage) destruction.
This isn't a book to give one hope and heart. It's not a book I would share with a friend or family member. It's a chronicle of a life of sin and degradation in full Technicolor...merely shaded by a few moments of a visitation with saving grace. There is very little of the hope and redeeming quality of that glimpse into the Light. Too much darkness overwhelms this small book.
I think the co-writers of this author's story should have advised her to take a different tact. A more spiritually lightening story with her sad life included (the flip side of the one written) would have been much better.
I fear the reality of her "visitation" just wasn't strong enough to really carry a book.
I wonder if I make myself clear here. It's the difference between a person whining about how they got punched in the face, broke their arm, then cut their own finger off, and then found a way to get an education;
and a person who tells you their life was difficult but they found a God who loved them and showed them how to overcome it all through love.
It's how you say it and where you place the focus.
Can't recommend this one...
Deborah/TheBookishDame
1 comments:
I am reading "Chasing Heaven" right now. I enjoy the book. Sometimes I wonder if it is real. However, if the book was written too good, it would have seemed more professional. The fact that it isn't seems like a true account. I think she can only relate what and how she experienced the event from her point of view. It is sometimes hard to relate to anothers experience unless you have experienced it yourself. I think that there are many near death experiences written, and together it does point to a true experience. I think that a person should ask themselves do you believe, do you want to believe, and if you don't, why not?
Melanie
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