90 minutes

I just read


The premise of the book is a pastor who was in a terrible car wreck & pronounced dead at the scene. 90% of the book was not about his Heaven experience but about struggling to recover from the horrible accident. While the book's message was hopeful overall, it made me angry that this man was dead & the prayers of thousands recovered him, while the prayers of thousands aren't doing the same for my dad. I'd be lying if I didn't say I resented this man's recovery in light of my dad's descent. But the book was good, and worth a read.

Favorite passage
As a child I'd sit on a big brown rug in my great-grandparents' living room and listen to them talk about the good old days. After hearing several stories, I thought, Those days weren't that good--at least the recollections they shared didn't seem so great. Maybe for them they truly were the good old days, or perhaps they forgot the negative parts of those days. At some points in our lives, most of us want to go back to a simpler, healthier, or happier time. We can't, but we still keep dreaming about how it once was.

In my twenties, when I was a disc jockey, we used to play oldies, and people who called in to request these songs often commented that in the old days we played good and bad records, but the bad ones faded from memory just like bad ones do now. No one ever asked us to play the music that bombed. The good songs make the former times seem great, as if all the music was outstanding. In reality, there was bad music. The same is true with experiences. We tend to forget the negative and go back to recapture pleasant events. The reality is, we have selectively remembered--and just as selectively forgotten.

B