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Bella's Gift: How One Little Girl Transformed Our Family and Inspired a Nation by [Rick Santorum, Karen Santorum]

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Rick Santorum

Bella's Gift: How One Little Girl Transformed Our Family and Inspired a Nation Kindle Edition

by Rick Santorum (Author), Karen Santorum (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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Rick and Karen Santorum’s inspiring story of life with Bella, their special-needs youngest child

Four days after Rick and Karen Santorum welcomed their eighth baby into the world they were given the devastating news that their little girl, Bella, was going to die. The full story of life with Bella has never been told until now. This inspiring family memoir explores what it means to embrace and celebrate the life of each person, and find hope, even in the midst of painful challenges.

Bella’s Gift is the story of how the entire family came together to love and care for Bella and how God strengthened them during the storms and blessed their family with grace, peace, and joy.

Searchingly honest, faith filled, and surprisingly joyful, Bella’s Gift is a loving, lived-out testimony to the truth that everyone counts, even “the least of these.”

Print length

254 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Thomas Nelson
Publication date

February 17, 2015
File size

12126 KB
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Rick Santorum, a native of Pennsylvania, was a candidate for the Republican nomination for president of the United States in 2012. He served in the House of Representatives from 1991 to 1995 and in the Senate from 1995 to 2007 and is the author of several books, including the 2005 New York Times bestseller It Takes a Family. Rick’s most important role and love in life is being a husband and father.

Karen Santorum is a former neonatal intensive care nurse and attorney. She is the author of two books: Letters to Gabriel and Everyday Graces: A Child’s Book of Good Manners. Karen and her husband of almost twenty-five years, Rick, are the parents of seven wonderful children: Elizabeth, John, Daniel, Sarah Maria, Peter, Patrick, and Isabella. Her greatest role and love in life is being a wife and mother. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00KQ2G48Y
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Thomas Nelson (February 17, 2015)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 17, 2015
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 12126 KB
Simultaneous device usage ‏ : ‎ Up to 5 simultaneous devices, per publisher limits
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Print length ‏ : ‎ 254 pages
Lending ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled

Best Sellers Rank: #227,376 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #349 in Biographies of Political Leaders
- #658 in Christian Inspiration
- #1,218 in Read & Listen for Less

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William Struse

Through the Eyes of a Child

Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2015

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I sit here at my computer after reading this book into the early morning hours and I ask myself how to put into words a summary of the faith, hope, and love the Santorums shared in this touching story of their daughter Bella. Bella's story is so much more than a heart wrenching tale of a precious child with life threatening challenges. It is the story of hope through faith triumphing in the face of impossible odds all carried in the arms of unmeasured love.

This is the story of defining and then acting upon what is truly important in life. Of realizing that life is a gift of God and it is our sacred duty as individuals and as a society to cherish and nourish that gift.

In reading about the Santorum's triumphs and tragedies it really shows that when love is present the struggles in life only make us stronger. From the introduction to the last chapter, this books is the story of love. Love as their daughter Elizabeth described in the introduction as "agape" love, that love done "in service of another, without expectation of a reward".

I especially appreciated how this story was built around the great love chapter of the Bible, 1 Corinthians 13. Each chapter of this book in some way developed the wonderful truths found there.

This coming May 13 the Santorums will be celebrating Bella's 7th birthday. Their past seven years of loving service for their daughter reminds me of an another Biblical story of service. In Genesis 29 it tells of Jacob's seven years of service for Rachel the daughter of Laban. The Bible describes it this way:

Genesis 29:20 And Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had to her.

The word love here in Gen. 29 is the Hebrew ahabah and this is the first occurrence of the word in the Bible. I think it only fitting to mention that in ancient Hebrew each letter was assigned a numerical value. The word ahabah in Hebrew is equal to 13.

Thank you Rick and Karen for sharing this story with us, I was blessed by it. As a home school family of 7 your testimony was especially poignant to us. Please give our love to Bella.

And now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13:13

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Frances

An inspiring look at God's gift of Bella

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2015

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What a beautiful book! This exploration of the experience and meaning of raising a disabled child will touch your heart, move your spirit, and challenge you to rethink many of your preconceptions about the emotional and spiritual significance of special needs children, both in our daily lives and in the life of our nation.

The book is co-written by former Senator Rick Santorum and his wife, Karen, an attorney and neo-natal nurse. The two trade the pen from chapter to chapter in a structure that pays off immensely in several ways.

Karen’s sections are brim-full of moments: painful moments, joyous moments; scary moments. There is the moment she first held Bella, when the “piercing blue spheres” of Bella’s eyes locked with her own; the drive home from the hospital with the “hum of the engine” and the “sun warming my face”; the first hour at home with “smell of honeysuckle” in the garden as the family takes pictures with Bella. Karen lingers in description—sharing the sights, sounds, smells, and emotions of the significant spots of time that have shaped her life with Bella. As the reader, you are right there with her. By her own report, Karen once struggled with pausing to take in the present. She says, “I had always struggled with living in the moment, and now it was just happening. We obviously had to plan the family schedule, but now we focused on constant awareness of the moment.” The intensity and beauty of her descriptions in Bella’s Gift attest just how well she has learned to live in the moment. Only someone with an intense awareness of the present could have crafted such vivid images.

Karen is honest about crisis junctures when she and her husband differed about Bella’s care, and it is inspiring to see the intentional way in which the two made small decisions that drew them back together despite these challenges. For example, after a particularly difficult experience, Karen reports, “In a chair on the other side, I felt there was much more than a twin-sized hospital bed between us”; but a few days later, “Rick and I started overlapping our days so we could have more time together.” The book is about Bella, but it is also an excellent study in what it takes to maintain a successful marriage, even under intense pressures.

Karen expresses frustration with doctors who wield “toxic words” and incompetent hospitals where cost concerns or failure to value the disabled lead to inferior care. But she is also full of praise and gratitude for caring doctors who learned Bella’s name and a hospital whose ambulance “came to care for Bella, but . . . rescued me too.” She gratefully acknowledges family and friends who served and supported her family, mentioning many of them by name and detailing the help they provided. Although caring for Bella is such a challenge, Karen’s chapters are a testament to the power of gratitude and the importance of community.

Finally, Karen’s own voice is strong and bracing, but she also invites other voices into her pages. The most frequent of these are the voice of Scripture and the voice of C.S. Lewis. Her quotations from each are well chosen and gracefully applied and add depth and power to her account

Where Karen gives the moment, Rick gives history. His chapters offer several different kinds of context that add dimensions to Bella’s story. He tells the story of his son Gabriel in a way that allows readers to understand the role Bella plays in her father’s spiritual life. He explains how his position on abortion developed from a scientific investigation of conception and human development, then reveals how Gabriel and Bella “transformed a policy position of defending the unborn to a passionate battle for the dignity of every human life.” By telling the history of his relationship with Karen, how “from the very beginning, Karen put her professional dreams on hold to put family first and help me pursue my calling,” and giving us the background of their lives – moves from house to house, home schooling, political campaigns – he adds breadth to Karen’s up-close portrait of life as Bella’s mother. While Karen’s pages dwell in description, Rick’s chapters chronicle events – political, familial, emotional, and spiritual. Her chapters give close-ups; his mostly panoramas. Finally, while Karen weaves Scriptural passages and brief quotations from Lewis throughout her writing, Rick delves deep into the work of Saint Thomas More, drawing inspiration from his letters.

In the chapters of both writers, there are passages that make you shiver, like Karen’s explanation of the significance of Bella’s birthday, and Rick’s story of learning the condition of his son Gabriel on a sonogram not a week after asking proponents of partial birth abortion, “What message are you sending to me in looking at that sonogram in a week or two, if the doctor says to us that our child isn’t what we want?” And there are details that particularly touch your heart, like Karen’s report that in the summer of 2008, “We had a ‘birthday’ party every week.”

The book succeeds grandly on a number of levels, and anyone who picks it up will find it well worth the read.

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Inigma

is good but not white

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 2, 2015

Verified Purchase

this Book writen in 2014. actualy apears much older the paper quality, is good but not white, giving it the apearence of a much older worke. it is well writen autobyography. & realey inspiring to people,who think that they are alone with this problem.

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