Before I Got Here
The Wondrous Things We Hear When We Listen to the
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
NAACP Image Award–winning actor Blair Underwood collects the best of the profound words of America’s children—including his own—in this touching collection perfect for sharing with loved ones.
Blair Underwood, known to millions as a star of television and film, has delivered brilliant performances in Self Made: Inspired by the Life of Madam C.J. Walker and as the voice of Makuu in Disney Channel’s The Lion Guard, among others. But his proudest accomplishment is being a loving husband and father of three children who keep him in touch with the true meaning of life—not fame, but family.
When Blair Underwood’s young son told him the dream he had about “the last night before there are no more mornings and no more nights,” Underwood asked him, “Who told you that?” His son replied, “God told me when he made me, but I only had one ear at the time, so I could only hear a little.” Through conversations with family and friends, Underwood discovered how very often people have children who say things that have “left them with their jaws on the floor.” As a consequence, he and Donyell Kennedy-McCullough created a website as a destination for others to share their profound moments with children. The response from people all over the world was tremendous and led to the creation of Before I Got Here, a collection of the best of the conversations and stories from people’s responses, revealing just how brilliant and spiritually in tune our children can be.
Before I Got Here makes you smile in the tradition of Kids Say the Darndest Things, and inspires—with the wonderful photographs of children taken by coauthor Donyell Kennedy-McCullough—is a wonderful gift for ourselves and others, showing the inherent wisdom that children possess, with the power to astound us and change our lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sometimes precocious, sometimes eerie, but nearly always with a spiritual bent, these anecdotes collected by actor Underwood revolve around, as the title suggests, children's lives before they were born. In many cases, this means a prior life, as in the three-year-old who told her mother she had sandals like her when she was a mommy "before I came to you." Other children told their parents they picked them while in heaven. Underwood, in his introduction, writes about a conversation he had with his four-year-old son in which his son said God told him about the rapture, but he "only had one ear at the time, so he could only hear a little." The book undoubtedly has a direction, but not an overly clear one; children's dreams, a Virgin Mary sighting, and a host of snippets that soft focus on the wonders of growth, discovery and parenting are thrown into the mix alongside full-color photographs of children eating ice cream, hugging, meditating and looking pensive. Parents with a strong sense of spirituality who are bowled over by the rigors of childrearing will find solace between these covers.
