The Heart Revolution by Sergio De La Mora is a book that surprised me with its power, creativity, and positive messages. Sergio De La Mora invites you to take a 40-day heart challenge reading along and rethinking your life, framing it in a positive light and allowing yourself to trust entirely your heart. It is the power of your heart that can lead you to success or keep you from fully embracing your greatness. I was skeptical when I began this book, but the author Sergio De La Mora won me over with his authenticity and his passion. De La Mora is the founder of the Cornerstone Church of San Diego, California, one of the fastest growing churches in the USA. He lives in San Diego with his wife and six daughters. But almost more importantly than any of that he came from a background of poverty as a Mexican immigrant to the US and was quickly initiated into gang culture as were some of his brothers. Sergio De La Mora was using drugs regularly as a young teen, smoking PCP and hanging with a gang his brother’s friends had started to keep from getting beaten up. Tragically, De La Mora was stabbed in the back when he was in grade eight and he spent many months recuperating. A good deal of that time was spent listening to radio and as he grew to appreciate the power of words, he realized he wanted to become an on air radio personality. He got his DJ’s licence and became quite well known as a celebrity Disc Jockey. The entertainment industry only fueled his drug habit. On a day when De La Mora, was promoting one of his own dance events, he discovered a flyer for the Cornerstone Church and he followed his instincts into a meeting there. De La Mora describes his young self, anticipating an imminent spiritual and physical break down, attending the meeting while high on cocaine. “So the night before I had come to church I had done two things. One, I did half a gram of cocaine, because I never went anywhere without being high. And two I told God these words: If You can change my life and take this monkey off my back I will do anything You want.” He knew he needed to get out of the life he was living and he found this particular church just when he needed it. The pastor there won him over and Sergio quit his job and became active at the church. Prior to the meeting he had felt that God couldn’t forgive him, a strung out Cholo. Regardless of your particular spiritual beliefs, or your degree of religiosity, this is a book that comes down to passion and life goals and philosophy. It is incredibly innovative. I loved that there were small breaks after some chapters directing the reader on line to sermons that supplement the writing. This is a smart way to encourage two things books to become more interactive and relevant and people to become more involved in the actual revolution itself. I applaud Baker Publishing and Sergio De La Mora for being creative and innovative in an industry that is in flux. Here for instance http://www.sergiodelamora.com/heartrev is an example. The foreword of the book is by Ed Young Jr. I will keep this book for a long time as a reminder to recharge and revisit the idea of leading with your heart. In fact I didn’t want it to end in some ways. The chapter on Revolutionizing Your Beliefs is particularly intelligent and discusses the difference between living religiously and having a relationship with Jesus. I love that I can extrapolate from that whole chapter what I need to illustrate even in my own life the power of negativity to drag you down and zap energy and the opposite and empowering nature of having an active relationship with your heart and your belief systems. It is more than just a semantic debate. It is the difference between passive religion and actively living your best life. Throughout the book there are numerous personal stories of people who felt unloved and people who were grieving giving themselves over to the heart revolution. Most of the examples are relevant and well used. But my only criticism is one example used in a chapter on Forgiveness that I found jarring. A family of children is sexually abused by an acquaintance. The repercussions of this are devastating for the entire family. However, the father of the children finds it in his heart to forgive the abuser. He confronts the person, a family friend and tells him he has to apologize, essentially. As a parent I find that to be really hard to believe, and I think the example will lose some readers. Aside from that poor example there is a lot here to like. Sergio De La Mora is smart and savvy and his passion is infectious and young enough to not yet come off jaded or overpackaged.

Thriftymommastips ranks this one a $$$$ out of $$$$$
The Heart Revolution by Sergio De La Mora, 2011, Baker Publishing Group, $17.99 US, Non Fiction, Christian Life, 278 pages.