Second Chances: A Christian Gen-X What-if Novel

by Cliff Ball

What would you do if God gave you the chance to live your life again?

Forty-seven-year-old Nathan Brooks has spent years looking back on the choices that shaped his life. The mistakes, the missed opportunities, and the moments he wishes he could change. Then the impossible happens.

Nathan wakes up in 1987 as his thirteen-year-old self, standing at the beginning of junior high with all his memories of the future intact. Determined to make better choices, Nathan embraces the opportunity to relive his teenage years. But as he reconnects with family, friendships, church life, and first love, he discovers that changing the past is far more complicated than he imagined. Every decision creates new consequences, and the future he remembers begins to slip away.

As the sights and sounds of the late 1980s into the early 1990s surround him once again, Nathan must learn whether a second chance is about rewriting the past or trusting God with the future.

Second Chances is a heartfelt Christian coming-of-age novel filled with faith, family, friendship, romance, and the nostalgia of growing up in the 1980s and 1990s.

715 pages, Kindle Edition

Published June 23, 2026

About the author

I'm a Christian first and foremost. I'm from Arizona and currently live in Phoenix. I have a BA and Technical Writing Certificate from University of North Texas. I won 3rd in a short story contest for a magazine through my high school Creative Writing class. I've been independently published since 2008.

I'm a fan of a bunch of different genres, which is why a lot of my novels are different genres. From time travel to alternate history to lite sci-fi to Christian end times/political thrillers.

As a reader, I loathe novels with tons of minutiae where the author describes everything down to practically its atomic structure, so I write fast-paced novels and I try not to get bogged down in unimportant details that go on and on and on for page after page.....

Returned to writing after almost 10 years away.

In order of original publication:
Out of Time - 2008
Don't Mess With Earth - 2009
The Usurper - 2010
Shattered Earth - 2010
Voyager and the Aliens - 2011
Dust Storm - 2011
New Frontier - 2011
Times of Trouble - 2012
Times of Trial - 2012
Final Frontier - 2012 (sequel to New Frontier)
Beyond the New Frontier - combined novel
Times of Turmoil - 2013
Jon Ryan - 2013
Xavier Doolittle - 2013
Times of Rebellion - 2013
Times of Destruction - 2014
Times of Judgment - 2014
Times of Tribulation - 2014
The Long Journey - 2015
The Falling Away - 2015
The Great Deception - 2016
The Great Tribulation - 2016
Guardians of Genre - 2025
The Plot Thickens - 2025
The Algorithmic Draft - 2025
The Unwritten Fallout - 2025
Books 5 - 10 - 2025, 2026

http://cliffball.net
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