Cardiac Haiku
 
Medic alert charm bracelet:
Frankenheart prevents
Malignant arrythmia.
  
 
  
Lessons on Writing from the Heart

I have to admit it  is difficult for me to write this.  Writing may be a strength, a gift entrusted  to me.  Still, I struggle with how to put it to its best use.  
  
Recently, I had a conversation with a writer and advisor of writers who reinforced some facts of an authors' life.  One, writing books is not about making money.  No surprise, naturally.  Two, many authors write books to launch a related career in teaching  others to write, or alternately to achieve enough recognition to become known on  the lecture circuit.  Following in the footsteps of Mark Twain and Robert Frost,  I guess.
 
Not that I scorn any sucessful literary figures, but I doubt whether I'll become one of the few.     
     
I examined how and why the Spirit is leading me to write.  It comes down to this:  though I have only a little light, still I have been placed here to let that light shine.  Why  do I write?  To share the light, and perhaps, if the Spirit shows me how to lift  the candle high enough, to cast a little of that light behind me.
 
The Spirit has shown  me that transparency about our struggles is good, while in writing as in  life, placing all the blame for our struggles on others is  counterproductive.  Vulnerability is good, but attention-getting for the purpose  of self-aggrandizement puts my ego directly in the way of the little light I  have to share.  If you begin to get a sense my little light sometimes flickers,  you are reading me right:  I'm so far from perfect.  And so it becomes safe to compensate by saying less rather than more.  
 
I strive to write from what I find in my own heart, in response to my own experiences.  It is not always easy to know how much to filter, and how much is too much. Blogs tending toward daily updates on grooming routines and household products, in my opinion, err on the side of too much information.  Unless I'm filling out a marketing survey, I doubt if anyone really cares what I think of these things.  But just in the event you do, I 
won't be secretive: shea butter, baking soda and borax.
 
I'm sharing some personal information here to let readers know why my writing is going on hold for a 
while, and from here may progress more slowly than I had hoped a few months ago. 
 
My health isn't great, and that's an understatement.  I'd need a medic alert charm bracelet to list all my 
conditions, so I won't bore you with my entire history.  Those who know me well know it's nothing new.  I've known about the risk of sudden death due to hypertrophic cardiomyopathy--an hereditary condition--for more than a  decade.  

Doctors have given me less than a year to live more times than I care  to say.  
 
There is a great advantage  to knowing that any day--today--might be the last.  I know my friend Richard claimed his awareness of mortality as a voluntary spiritual discipline.   I believe he gained a greater appreciation of life through his awareness of death, and that when he died unexpectedly, he was prepared to go. 
 
In my  own case, advances in medical technology have finally caught up with me.  I'm  going into the hospital next week for a defibrillator implant--not because my  heart is that much worse, but because heart treatments are that much better.  The purpose of the defibrillator is to send an eletrical shock to the heart to re-establish a regular rhythm whenever a fatal rhythm develops.  A Frankenheart won't make me immortal, but I have been told it will cut back on the potential causes of death.  Still, I maintain the hope and intention of completing more writing before the end of my life, yet as we have  been instructed to say, "if the Lord wills and we live. . ."  

Prayers appreciated,

Pam Richards


 

An excerpt from the introduction to Walk Through the Valley:

The promises of the Beatitudes are more thrilling than any other eight consecutive verses of Scripture I can think of. What can be better than to own the kingdom of Heaven? To be comforted by God?  To inherit the Earth? To be filled with goodness?  To be shown mercy?  To see God? To be identified as God's own child?  To be be greatly rewarded in the kingdom of Heaven?  Yet the beatitudes teach us the path  to ascend the mountaintops lies through the valley, because this is the starting  point all humanity shares.  The word translated "salvation" in the New Testament  comes from a root word that means "freedom." Freedom implies movement and  action, not stasis. In the Beatitudes, Christ frees us to grow, to progress, and  to fight the good fight against our enemies within,  liberating ourselves one by one from the obstacles that encumber us.  Our spiritual journey is not complete as long as we are still alive, so we go on placing one foot before the other. 
   
Although I  would love to say I'd been with Rich Mullins every step of the way, I wasn't.   Our lives led in very
different directions, but still it was my friend Richard  who first taught me the Beatitudes.  Some of our best conversations centered on  the topic.  I was a new Christian, and though I've sometimes strayed and  sometimes stagnated since then, this is the map of the journey that has unfolded  for me over time.  I have learned through my own mistakes that neither a  milestone of spiritual growth, nor a fall from grace entitles us to abandon the  pilgrimage and take up occupancy in self-satisfaction or stagnation. Not that  growth is required before we can be saved, but because growth is the purpose for  which we were saved.  It is for freedom: for movement: for the journey, that  Christ has set us free.
 
I find myself often affirming that we loved to argue, just to clarify that I  don't pretend to speak on Richard's behalf.  We had our own perspectives about spiritual matters, but we each found through our discussions a synthesis leading  to greater understanding, as though by juxtaposing our ideas we could come up  with something neither of us had thought of before.  Everyone who knew Richard  well knew he had a great gift
of  connecting with others in this way.  Yet we both agreed that as freely as our  words may flow, the Beatitudes will transform us only when we pour our lives  into them.  You will find in Walk Through the Valley my best
memories  of conversations and events that led me to a deeper grasp of what Richard  thought of the Beatitudes, and how he lived them out.  
  
 

When we have engaged our human enemies long and hard, one day we may hear the Spirit of God whisper as we stand on the battlefield:
 
"The heart is sick.  Look into the core.  The center is imperfect."
 
Love the sinner, hate  the sin.  It doesn't take much reconnaisance to locate the enemy.  These ills  are all common to humanity.  When we enter the Kingdom of Heaven, we will learn  to hate hate, greed, jealousy, vindictiveness, pride, rage, slander, gluttony,  lust.  One by one, when we strip our hearts of our enemies within, we reveal the  love that God placed there when he clothed us in the divine nature.  

A passing  kind thought for humankind does not aim high enough:  we must continue to rid  ourselves of the enemies within, for it is the pure in heart who see God.