It is time for a FIRST Wild Card Tour book review! If you wish to join the FIRST blog alliance, just click the button. We are a group of reviewers who tour Christian books. A Wild Card post includes a brief bio of the author and a full chapter from each book toured. The reason it is called a FIRST Wild Card Tour is that you never know if the book will be fiction, non~fiction, for young, or for old...or for somewhere in between! Enjoy your free peek into the book!
You never know when I might play a wild card on you!
Today's Wild Card author is:
and the book:
Crossbooks; 2 edition (January 12, 2012)
***Special thanks to Samantha Ryan Chandler for sending me a review copy.***
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Samantha Ryan Chandler grew up in a small town in “nowhere, Louisiana”. She formed a not for profit international children’s ministry helping severely deformed medical kids from 3rd. world countries by gaining donated surgeries in the United States. She is an author and contributing writer to Southern Writer’s Magazine. Her proudest achievement is mother of three girls.
Visit the author's website.
SHORT BOOK DESCRIPTION:
The tale of Samantha Ryan Chandler's life is evocatively portrayed in her book: A Love Story, How God Pursued Me and Found Me. It tells of a life that is as disturbing and unsettling as it is uplifting and, in the end, gratifying. How "A girl from Nowhere, Louisiana" finds her way from such humble beginnings to live and walk amongst presidents and the supremely rich, only to find her trust and faith betrayed by those that she loved and trusted the most. She would be tested to the point where she began to doubt her own sanity and, at the moment of her greatest desperation and doubt, she was found by God and brought back from the brink of hopeless despair. Blessed with an almost unquenchable optimism and a unique sense of humor, she relates the story of a life that will speak to those who have encountered abuse, unfairness and anguish. Her love for her children and her faith in God carried her through a crucible of fire and in the end, made her a better, stronger person, ready to carry on with a life that is again filled with love, joy and laughter. A Love Story, How God Pursued Me and Found Me will both inspire you and touch your heart.
List Price: $7.00
File Size: 296 KB
Print Length: 108 pages
Publisher: Crossbooks; 2 edition (January 12, 2012)
Sold by: Amazon Digital Services
Language: English
ASIN: B006X5ZH54
Text-to-Speech: Enabled
Lending: Enabled
AND NOW...THE FIRST CHAPTER:
Prologue
I write my story from a place that God took my hand and led me down a path. I do not regret the horrors I have experienced nor do I want to do them again. I am profoundly changed by every turn in the road that I did not choose to go down. I speak of massive acts of unfairness and perfidy. My writings give great insight and hope to anyone that has encountered wrongs in life that are out of control. This would encompass anyone that has ever taken a breath. To all that have encountered childhood abuse, I give you courage. I pray that all that reads this will gain optimism for their own future. If a skinny girl from Nowhere, Louisiana with unnerving circumstances and totally stuck on ignorance can rise; then all can rise.
My background is life. My qualifications are that I have had more happen to me than Hollywood would ever think of to write about. If I had not lived it, I would not believe it. I have been quite poor and only gazed at wealth. I have experienced poverty to the point of wondering where my next meal would come from. This has happened in more than one cycle of my life. I also lived within the walls of the privileged having dined with two United States presidents, governors in their mansions, and invited to dine with President Mitterrand at Versailles. I am a voracious reader and cling to self-help books. I have yet to see one written from the “privileged” world spelling out what greed is capable of doing. Having run in the circles of the very wealthy, I have witnessed the destruction of marriages when the wealthy husband does not want to share the revenues of many years of marriage.
I co-founded a not for profit children's ministry that is now international. I have appeared on television and many newspapers have interviewed me. I have modeled. I have read the Bible eleven times and with fifteen years of Bible study. Nothing had prepared me for the life I lived.
Ignorance is fixable; stupidity is terminal. I was ignorant for much of my life. My narrative has colossal betrayal, distortion of truth, vulnerability and true love. I started with the challenges of growing up to a pagan abusive Irish mom that dallied with a spirit table. I chronicle events showing God's hand in my life even when I was without a clue who He was. It is a journey He takes me down many paths and then prepared me for the fight of my life…marrying a man worth in excess of 100 million dollars and then to culminate with the divorce called annihilation.
I write of seeing an angel three times, God's hand holding mine once, and peering deep into Satan's eyes filled with fire that was endless in capacity.
My book is filled with scriptures and God given promises. God has taken me to the place that if He said it….it is done….the boldness of David. I have become David bold. I pray with his boldness expecting no less than what is written in scripture. I have often said if Samantha says it, then it's possible to be negotiable but when our Lord says He will….it is not a suggestion but facts.
I tell of many places where God intervened in miraculous ways and His relentless pursuit of me. My book comes with a guarantee that the reader will laugh out loud as well as cry between a verb and a vowel, all coming from the sentence. You then will feel happy and grateful you were not chosen to walk in my shoes.
Chapter One
Life According to Samantha
I begin to write this with the ending unknown. All I do know is that I am a child of God, and I win. I am certain that when I am heading to a finish, God will have restored me to victory. It is His job. It is His promise.
I grew up in a very small town in the middle of Nowhere, Louisiana, to a pagan mother and a former altar boy in the Catholic religion father. God did not live in our home, nor was He invited in. My mother was quite abusive, and my father lived in the land of denial. My father's mom was in love with Jesus but spoke almost no English, only French. My Irish grandparents adored me, but they were unaware of anything religious.
As a young girl, I heard ghastly stories of my mom and her antics. She was more than likely the most beautiful woman in her Irish enclave of a village, but she had the soul of the wicked. The stories I heard were beyond frightening. As a young girl, she "worked a spirit table." This meant that several people would put their hands on the table and ask it questions. Answers came through an alphabet formed by how many times the table would rock or move. Participants even bragged about contacting a deceased spirit and gaining information that checked to be true with the local city records. This apparently scared the group, so they took the table to the woods and left it. As the story goes, the table was back on the porch the next morning! I have no knowledge of how long this continued or what else happened, but hearing about it profoundly affected me.
I grew up in a home that felt "haunted." As a kid going out on Halloween night to trick-or-treat, I would always be more frightened of returning home than of being out in the neighborhood. This feeling never left me, even as a matured in age and relationship Christian . The house was unnerving. I will tell of more stories as I unveil my life and God's relentless pursuit of me.
I recall hearing that my birth was a medical miracle, as my mom was
told after birthing my older brother that she would never conceive again.
My Thoughts:
This really is an impossibly true story. It seems more like something from a movie than what actually happened; but this is what Samantha's life was really like.
I found the story a bit hard to follow because the sequence of events wasn't always in order. But it reminded me of how I write letters, jumping from point to point as my brain fishes things from the depths.
It is also an amazing story of how God is working even when it seems that evil is everywhere.
1 comment:
Hi, Beth.
I was just stopping by from Wild Card. I was curious what others thought of this. You said about the same as I did as to how this story was so amazing it seemed more like something out of Hollywood. God does wonderful things, Amen? I agree it was hard to follow because of the way it moves around and yet, her writing style made it so much more real.
Have a great Friday.
Kat
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