Personal Prayer Power Blog

I first met Elizabeth Sherrill in 1980 when I was chosen to attend the Guideposts Writers Workshop in Rye, New York.  Elizabeth and her husband, John are incredible speakers and teachers who taught us how to write a Guideposts story and also how to think like a reader and how to ask the questions readers would ask if they had a chance to meet the person whose story we were ghost-writing. 

Elizabeth and John co-authored The Hiding Place with Corrie Ten Boom and also the Cross and the Switchblade.  Her thirty or so books have sales in excess of 50 million.  To find out more about Elizabeth go to www.elizabethsherrill.com 

Her latest book All the Way to Heaven is very unique because for the first time, Elizabeth chronicles her own life and faith journey instead of writing someone else’s.  You’ll be surprised to find that this prolific Christian writer was brought up as an agnostic and was in her thirties before she took  the leap of faith to join the church and declare her belief in Christ.  You’ll also be surprised to learn that she suffers from depression, sometimes for long periods.  And you’ll be intrigued by the journies she and John have taken through the world and through the decades of our recent history, meeting and inteviewing some of the most fascinating figures of our times including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. 

But most of all, this book is about heaven.  Elizabeth divides it into three parts.  In “Heaven behind me” she tells about her days before she found faith and she sees how God was present guiding her even then.  In “Heaven around me” she tells of how she finally found faith and how during any minute of any ordinary day we can follow her lead and find a small glimmer of heaven in the moment we’re currently living. 

In “Heaven before me” Elizabeth takes us on a journey to expand our ideas about the heaven we will enter when we leave this earth.    She sets aside cliches and embarks on a remarkably thoughtful, deeply thought out and keenly felt investigation about heaven.  

Her bottom line, however, isn’t about heaven as a far away place when we die, but rather heaven being right here on earth as we’re living in God’s Kingdom.    

Elizabeth certainly has expanded the way I think about heaven.  My prayer is that through prayer you’ll get in touch with the part of heaven that’s yours today wherever you are.