Write From the Heart

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Kindle first edition of From Pharaoh's Hand

"By day I am the dutiful historian, the record maker of others' cardiac ailments.  But by night, my pen belongs to the Great Physician, and my fingers bleed His words from the brokenness of my own healing heart." –c.h.green 

A couple of years before my divorce in 2008, I began learning medical transcription.  I wanted to work from home, so that my schedule would be flexible enough to allow me to be there for my son when he got out of school in the afternoons and also be home with him during the summer.  I already knew how to type fairly fast (about 90 wpm), so I thought to myself, "This will be a piece of cake."  Not so.  Six years later, I am still learning new medical phrases, new prescription drugs, and new procedures.  The medical field is ever changing and ever growing.  Although I have become quite experienced as a transcriptionist, my preference is typing up my own notes, works in progress, and creative endeavors.  Yet, being a single mom, it is challenging to find the time to devote to my writing--er, His writing, "His" being the good Lord above.  I want to be careful to give Him praise for this beautiful gift.

As a teenager, whenever troubles came my way, I wrote.  I filled pages with secret thoughts, ambitions, poetry, and such.  Many times the pages would end up in the trash barrel.  If I could retrieve them, I'm sure I would laugh at my teenage angst-filled drivel.  I had so much to say for being such a withdrawn, shy, quiet child.  It seems I was born an old soul--affected deeply by the sufferings of those around me and my own, which were many.  

My father was an alcoholic much of my childhood.  He died at 51 from a rare brain disorder (probably intensified and complicated by his alcoholism).  My mother was a good Christian woman, full of faith and love, and she died at 61(when my son was 18 months old) from a rare form of breast cancer called Paget disease.  My mother and my mother-in-law (She had leukemia) were going through treatment at the same time.  One was in Vanderbilt University Hospital, the other in Jackson-Madison County General 225 miles apart.   Invariably when sorrow came, out with it came the journals.  (This was before the days of online blogging and Microsoft Word).

I had always tried to keep my writings private.   Maybe I felt it just too awkward to bare my soul to an outside world.  I was unsure of my abilities--forever editing, forever balling up the paper and tossing it away.  I felt weird.  I felt different.  I felt out of place, out of step with my own peers.  It has taken me years to realize the reason for that.  I am different.  I am called to be different.  I am called to be me.  The things God has called me do and say and write are not my own.  The voice I hear is not mine.  It is His spirit.   It is His way of beautifying the sorrows of this life--of taking the pain and creating blessing from it.  It is not up to me to say why tragedy strikes some and not others.  But I am confident that there is a purpose for it, and that He wants me to use it to bring comfort to others who may be struggling with their own tragedies.  So I write.  

In 1998, I became acquainted with the World Wide Web.  Seven years later, I found Blogger.  Now the online blogging never fully replaced the physical journals.  It just became another place I wrote.  I loved it because it afforded me the opportunity to learn from other writers, most of whom had started platforms to promote their books.  I also met many wonderful Christian women who shared their joys and triumphs and sorrows with each other from day to day.  It was through this forum that I met Diane Viere, a Minnesota mom with a prodigal son.   Diane began blogging at Partners in Prayer For Our Prodigals about her journey as the mother of a prodigal.  From that venture came, The Prodigal Hope Network.  Meanwhile, my own blog, Gone With the Wreath had morphed into a new blog, Hope Lives.  It is amazing to look back and see where the Lord has brought us from.  In all this.  He takes our sorrow, our pain, our heartache and turns it into ministry, multiplies the blessings to feed the hungry.  God is so good.

In 2006, I found myself unemployed.  Still blogging through the crises that came.  Still looking to God for answers.  Still writing from my heart about the pain, about my faith, about His goodness.   The plot for a novel began forming, and finally I decided there was no better time to learn to write a book.  I began pounding out the pages, and ended up with a work of Christian suspense--the title, FROM PHARAOH'S HAND, the story of a prodigal.  A young girl finds herself in trouble and becomes a runaway, and not only a runaway, but then a kidnapped runaway.  FROM PHARAOH'S HAND is about Elizabether Merriweather's captivity in her personal land of Egypt.  It is a story of redemption, of deliverance--a story of HOPE.

Since 2006, the book has been through two moves due to the divorce (yet another crisis of my life).  It lay dormant on my nightstand for a good long while.  I would bring it out, edit it, rewrite parts of it, and put it back.  All of this done at night after my sometimes 12-hour days of transcription work was through.  Hard times called for two and sometimes three jobs.  There was little time for pursuing publication.  And yet, the story still begs to be told, and I have faith that it soon will be.

Presently I am working on getting the novel formatted for E-book distribution.  In the works is the cover art as well.  If it is to be, then soon FROM PHARAOH'S HAND will be available for download.  But until then, she lives with hope and abundance...and she writes.

Squidoo Pages
A collection of lenses.

Hope on Hubpages
A collection of hubs I've written.

Hope Lives...
My person blog

The Ivy Wreath
My poetry blog