 This week, the Christian Fiction Blog Alliance is introducing One Perfect Day FaithWords (October 22, 2008) by Lauraine Snelling. Note I’ve also updated my post on One Holy Night.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Today, Lauraine Snelling is a member of the more than Two Million Books In Print club, but when she first began, she was a mother of three teenagers with a simple dream to write “horse books for kids.â€
All told, she has over 50 books published. Lauraine’s work has been translated into Norwegian, Danish and German as well as produced as books on tape. Awards have followed her dedication to “telling a good storyâ€: the Silver Angel Award for An Untamed Land and a Romance Writers of America Golden Heart for Song of Laughter.
Helping others reach their writing dream is the reason Lauraine teaches at writer’s conferences across the country. She mentors others through book doctoring and with her humorous and playful Writing Great Fiction tape set. Lauraine also produces material on query letters and other aspects of the writing process.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Two mothers end up more closely connected that they could dream…and yet they are strangers to one another.
The first has two children–twins, a boy and girl, who are seniors in high school. She wants their last Christmas as a family living in the same home to be perfect, but her husband is delayed returning from a business trip abroad. And then there’s an accident–a fatal one.
Meanwhile, the other mother has a daughter who needs a new heart, and so the loss of one woman becomes the miracle the other has desperately prayed for. While one mother grieves, and pulls away from her family, the other finds that even miracles aren’t always easy to receive.
If you would like to read the first chapter of One Perfect Day, go HERE
Andrea’s Comments: Snelling writes a moving tale that will keep readers who like heart-breakers turning the pages. It’ll also get you thinking about the book’s pet cause, organ donation, which is hardly the open and shut case she’d like you to conclude. Now, I totally understand the feelings of believers who figure anything that saves a life is a good thing and never think past that. I think it’s foolish to not ask the hard ethical questions on this issue, but I can respect the argument itself.
What I don’t respect is responding to folks’ concerns by implying the only reason to not sign an organ donor card is selfishness. This is not a logical argument. It merely shuts down debate. Making folks afraid to voice their concerns about the ethics of organ donation does not answer them.
“That’s selfish” does not explain how a doctor does not have a conflict of interest when he’s wanting to kill a patient with a severe brain injury to save the life of those with severe injuries to other organs. It does not answer concerns that harvesting organs from the human body cheapens human life by using human beings for spare parts, desecrates the temple of the Holy Ghost, and other questions on whether this a good thing to do something created in the image of God. It does not answer how redefining death as brain death solves the ethical problems arising from the fact the organs of those dead by the traditional definition (cold and stiff) are useless.
It does not answer the question of whether Christians should blindly follow the humanistic logic behind this practice. For the humanist, it makes total sense to take organs from the person they can keep alive, but who they believe will never regain consciousness, and use them to replace failing organs in the otherwise healthy. But if we’re using traditional Christian ethics, where all life is sacred, there are genuine questions not being answered.
Few of us will dare to publicly voice our questions. We know the only answers we will receive are attacks on our person. It makes me wonder why those on the pro-side respond to questions in the manner of those who have no answer. Want to get more people to sign up to be used for spare parts when a doctor desperate for the parts decides they’re dead, or more accurately, decides their brain has suffered such a severe injury that their life has no worth and they’re better off dead? Let folks ask their questions without shame, and actually bother to give real answers.
But, to get off my soap box, if the fact the story is designed to guilt you into signing an organ donor card doesn’t put you off, and you need catharsis, and/or an entertaining exploration of the grieving process and heart transplants, this will do it.