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    Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again
    Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again
    Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again
    Audiobook7 hours

    Waking Up in Heaven: A True Story of Brokenness, Heaven, and Life Again

    Written by Crystal McVea and Alex Tresniowski

    Narrated by Crystal McVea

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    New York Times bestseller! A remarkable and inspirational memoir about one woman's near-death experience, who was dramatically changed by the nine minutes she spent in heaven.

    On December 10, 2009, McVea, a thirty-two-year-old mother of four, went to the hospital for a routine procedure. While undergoing treatment, her face suddenly turned a dark shade of blue, then black. Her mother screamed for help, and a nurse tried to revive her…to no avail.

    Today, Crystal does not remember what happened in that hospital room during the nine minutes she was unconscious and unable to breathe on her own. She has no memory of the panic and the rushing nurses and the loud cries of “Code Blue.”

    She only remembers drifting off…and waking up in heaven.

    This unexpected meeting of a self-described sinner and skeptic with her God changed everything. Raised Christian, she had left her faith behind after childhood abuse and the subsequent struggles and suffering of her troubled teens and early adulthood. She longed to believe but felt abandoned, broken, and undeserving.

    A moving autobiographical testament to the power of divine love and forgiveness, Waking Up in Heaven shares the message of hope, healing, and compassion McVea brought back from her brush with God.

    This brave, honest account of years lost to shame and guilt will inspire those who’ve stumbled along their own spiritual journey, with the uplifting reminder that no one is beyond the reach of grace and redemption, and that, in the words of the author, “God is real. Heaven is real. And God’s love for us is the realest thing of all.”
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateApr 2, 2013
    ISBN9781442363984
    Author

    Crystal McVea

    Crystal McVea is the author of Waking Up in Heaven. With a deep rooted passion for the needy and lost, Crystal speaks around the country bringing a message of hope and redemption. She is a schoolteacher and lives in Oklahoma with her husband Virgil, a US Army veteran, and their four children. To learn more, go to CrystalMcVea.com.

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    Reviews for Waking Up in Heaven

    4.5/5

    54 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I'm in a real bad place and have been for two years now.. I feel like it's going to get the best of me. I'm angry at God because my entire life has been one heartbreak after another starting in my early childhood. I thought when I got old I could relax some and go out without more catastrophes... But that's the case. I love God but i'm very angry at him and this book was what I needed to hear. She did a great job and my hat is off to her.
    • 5/5
      We all at some level have hurts, wounds, betrayal and anger. God desires our restoration if we allow him too. He reaches out to us both of his hands and says come, but it is our choice. God wants our healing more then us!
      This book shows us God's heart of his love & restoration for each one of us.
      Please read or listen to this book. ❤️
    • 5/5
      Amazing book on God and His work in our lives. ❤️
    • 3/5
      Wake Up In Heaven by Crystal McVea

      ★★★

      This isn’t my normal kind of book. While I would call myself spiritual, that’s as far as I would go. Many of these books of this genre have been known to make me uncomfortable but when my therapist handed it to me, insisting it would help me out, I took it because trust me, I need all the help I can get ;-).

      The author doesn’t hold anything back. She tells her life story, how she got where she is and all her experiences. It is sad, emotional, raw, and completely honest. Life was rough for her when she was younger and I wanted to just wrap her up in my arms. She talks about the good and the bad, even the very bad. I give her credit for her ability to be so honest, to share her story with complete strangers; it couldn’t have been easy at all. Its matter of fact and not too preachy, which I liked (she had the attitude of “this is what I went through, your choice to believe it or not”). She just frankly tells her life story and her experience in the 9 minutes she was considered dead (as in she stop having any sort of breathing, pulse, etc but was not pronounced by a doctor) – where she went to Heaven. The last part of the book was a tad more preachy than the rest and repetitive. This book would have been better if it had been cut just a bit. I may not have agreed with everything the author said and I’m still up in the air about many issues but either way her story is commendable and a comfort.
    • 5/5
      A heart-wrenching, phenomenal book that tells the story of the life and death and life of a woman who lead a hard, lost life, then encountered God and is now living a joy filled life. Crystal died for nine minutes and went to Heaven and this book is about that, but it is first and foremost about her life prior to that experience, which lead up to the moment of her death. Crystal had a very hard life and always questioned the existence of God. Her life was filled with sexual abuse, absent and neglectful parents, promiscuity, abortion, death of loved ones, feelings of worthlessness and whenever a little light shone on her broken life it felt to her as if another calamity was just beginning to happen.All throughout the story of Crystal's life she inserts a chapter here and there to tell her story of being in Heaven. It is beautiful and breathtaking. Many ways it is like what we expect and have heard from others, but Crystal has a natural quality about her which conveys the awesomeness without trying to philosophize or theologize, like so many before her have done in their books. She simply tells what she say, what she felt and what she can and can't remember. No excuses. I am a Catholic and Crystal is not but I found her vision of Heaven to be everything that my religion teaches us it is. No where during her entire discussion of what she saw, felt and afterwards her thinking back upon it did she stray from the Catholic perspective of Heaven and I found this very exciting. Thus can heartily recommend Catholics read this amazing journey.I really appreciated Crystal's down-to-earth narrative voice of speaking humbly, telling her tale, not trying to answer the big questions, but only putting out there what she experienced, how she felt, in Heaven. When in Heaven she was filled with God's love and she knew God's plan, she knew why things happen as they do. On her return this enormous knowledge was simply gone. As we know man is not meant to understand the mystery of God's way, but just think, when we reach Heaven we will feel the peace of enlightenment because God is just. God is love. God is good.I love reading books like these. I don't always agree with everything the person concludes about their experience once they are back and thinking with human rationalizing, but I do believe in their journeys and that God is giving us something to ponder, to perhaps make changes in our lives, or to continue on our paths because Heaven IS waiting for us.
    • 3/5
      On 10 December 2009, Crystal McVea, mother of four, thirty-two years old, stopped breathing and fell into unconsciousness. She left her hospital room and spent nine minutes in heaven. Nine minutes in the presence of angels. Nine minutes in the presence of God. This is her story. A sort of a memoir, a look at the past and present of her life, interspersed with her remembrances from those nine minutes spent in the presence of the Creator. Her return to her earthly life came with God’s words: “Tell them what you can remember.”And so she has. Against the cruelty and difficulty of her life, she discovered uplifting words of peace and love as she experienced the glory of heaven and spent nine minutes with God.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      A very uplifting book about someone who really lived a wild youth can still be assured the promise of everlasting life. The description of her time in heaven only takes up a handful of the book, with the rest being about her life. The last 25 or so pages can be re-read for daily encouragement. A big take away is to obey those nudges from God!
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed this book. I found the author to be very candid and honest, and I truly believe she experienced what she says she experienced while she died. In particular, I found her honesty about the bad experiences and choices in her life to exemplify her point about God being with her (and everyone else) through all the good and bad, and being forgiven for everything, if only you have faith.