God Stories: Inspiring Encounters with the Divine

Skiff, an award-winning investigative journalist and correspondent for CNN, compiles an inspiring if uneven assortment of real-life accounts of meeting with the divine. Whether readers are actively religious or die-hard skeptics, the stories recounted will reaffirm God's existence and intervention in human affairs. Skiff draws upon such themes as listening to God's voice, answers to prayer, healing and confirmation of an afterlife. While less spiritually inclined readers may find some stories more attributable to coincidence than divine intervention, other tales are beyond rational explanation. In one account, a woman who had irreparable brain and organ damage was completely healed and discharged from the hospital after prayer. A man felt an urgent caution against taking an airline flight on which nine people were subsequently killed. In a similar tale of miraculous warnings about danger, a woman heard an audible voice tell her to stop right before she stepped in front of a seven-foot Australian snake's mouth. Mysterious and faith-inspiring, these stories are valuable even if some don't conform to readers' particular religious beliefs. (Nov. 11)