Facebook Fairytales by Emily Liebert Will Warm Your Heart and Inspire Your Spirit
Facebook has changed our collective social culture. It has spawned new phrases into our lexicon – “Facebook friend”, “friending”, “status update” to name a few. It has also helped us make connections over time and over miles.
Emily Liebert, author of Facebook Fairytales – Modern-Day Miracles to Inspire the Human Spirit (Skyhorse Publishing, Inc., $12.95, ISBN 978-1-60239-943-3), has collected 25 unique and amazing true stories to illustrate the power of Facebook and the connections it inspires. The foreword includes an interview with none other than Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg who is notoriously elusive about interviews. He was excited about Liebert’s book and very willing to contribute.
She asked for stories through her Facebook friends to get started, and soon the stories came en masse. Liebert tells Family First she actually had a couple of hundred stories to choose from when she got down to editing them for the book. She made sure they had unique subjects, interesting ways the connections were made and diversity in the story. And as the title is about fairytales, Liebert wanted to stress “there’s more than one way to realize your happy ending.”
Here are a few stories to whet your appetite for more of this amazing book – it’s sort of like Ty Pennington’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition done by Facebook.
A Baby Story – Facebook-Style
In Chapter 2, called Waiting for Baby, Liebert tells the story of Seth and Melissa who had the typical marital wish of having children. When they did get pregnant with twins, they were thrilled because they had tried for so long and in vitro fertilization doesn’t always work.
Melissa’s pregnancy progressed with some interesting turns but things seemed fine until Week 20 when tragedy struck. She went into premature labor and the babies’ lungs weren’t ready for birth. After the loss of these precious boys, they tried several other options but found nothing successful.
Not to be ones to give up, they created a flyer about themselves and their desire to adopt that they posted both on a blog they had started and as paper notices posted everywhere they could think of.
Finally around Thanksgiving, Seth decided to post the flyer on his Facebook page; he and Melissa figured the more people who see what they want, the better. Two days later, Seth’s friend asked to post the flyer to his page.
A week or so later, a friend from high school Seth hadn’t spoken to in over 20 years called Seth. She explained a situation she knew of about a family who couldn’t afford the fourth child with whom the mother was eight or nine months pregnant. Seth and Melissa interviewed the mother about her health and habits, etc and they decided it was a good fit.
So, on December 30, 2008, their son Noah was born and they brought their baby home, because of Facebook.
This story is particularly relevant to Liebert because she was going through the adoption process for her own son when she interviewed Seth and Melissa for this story.
A Kidney from Cathy
In Chapter 1, Liebert tells the amazing story of Cathy who, through her high school boyfriend’s status update, learned of his friend, a young mother who was dying of kidney failure and needed a transplant from someone with Type O blood. Cathy knew she was Type O.
For reasons unknown to even herself, Cathy struck up a conversation with Beth, the patient, and they started discussing Cathy donating her kidney.
When she finally told her husband Drew what she was considering, he was a bit less than pleased. “This is nuts!” were his words. She was considering an organ transplant to a stranger a thousand miles away. Over time, Drew understood he couldn’t change the course of events and it served him better to be supportive of his wife’s desire to make a difference for someone else.
Finally, after a battery of tests and even a scare that she wouldn’t be able to help, Cathy was able to finally get her wish to help Beth, her new friend. The surgery was a success.
From Beth in the book: “When I think about Cathy, it brings me to tears every time. I mean, how do you thank someone for allowing you to watch your children grow up?”
A Facebook Group Brings Healing
The Elkins family were a close-knit family – three beautiful children, all healthy and active. Their middle daughter Jessica was involved in all kinds of activities and had a very special bond with her mother, Michelle. “The two were inseparable,” Liebert writes in the book.
One day, just a few days before Christmas, Jessica met her sister Emilee and her boyfriend at a local Mexican restaurant for a relaxing lunch now that her college classes were over for the semester and the holiday break was upon them. Midway through lunch, Jessica felt ill and left to sit in the car.
Over the course of a few hours, Jessica fell severely ill, weak, aching and vomiting. The doctors eventually diagnosed the flu and had her rest to run its course. The vomiting did not stop and eventually, Michelle noticed Jessica was covered with purple bruise-like spots all over her body.
Michelle and her husband Talbot rushed their daughter to an emergency room where they got the devastating news they couldn’t imagine – Jessica had bacterial meningitis and her brain rapidly began to shut down. Over 400 friends passed through the hospital within 24 hours to say good-bye to their beautiful friend. The Lord took Jessica the day after Christmas, 2007.
After this devastation, there were fundraisers and scholarships in Jessica’s name. Even her hometown of Athens, Alabama named her birthday, September 23rd in her honor. One person, however, took a different route to process his grief.
Her father Talbot started a Facebook group called “In Memory of Jessica Elkins” which had over 1,000 members within the first 6 days. At the writing of Facebook Fairytales, he had written a new post to Jessica (and the over 6,000 group members) every day for the past 2 years.
“It’s my way of keeping our connection alive and maintaining my faith.” Talbot says in the book. It helped him cope with his loss and continue to communicate with Jessica’s friends through the group.
These three examples are just a small sample of the 25 stories in Liebert’s touching book. You’ll find a wide range of subjects spanning the globe in this book. Stories that are uplifting, motivating, heartwarming and most of all, stories of real connections.
Sometimes social media gets criticized for being a lazy way to be friends with people, but this book will change your thoughts about that. Facebook Fairytales shows you that Facebook has changed many lives and will continue to do so as it grows.
About Emily Liebert
Emily Liebert is an award-winning author, writer and editor. She edited Kerry Kennedy’s bestseller Being Catholic Now and she writes for magazines including Elite Traveler and Cottages & Gardens. She was the editor-in-chief of The WAG magazine and worked for Peter Jennings Reporting. She is also the mother of two young children.