When you hear that someone has written a children’s book called Jesus Can Heal My Heart, it’s easy to assume it’s simple, maybe even sentimental—a nice little story for Sunday school.
That’s not what I found in my conversation with Shea Odom.
Shea was born in Atlanta with a congenital heart defect. At six weeks old, she went into heart failure at home and had her first open-heart surgery. Later, as a teenager, she underwent another heart surgery to repair a leaking mitral valve. As a young adult, she developed atrial fibrillation—an arrhythmia that leaves you exhausted and, at times, terrified. Years of medications, cardioversions, and eventually a double-valve replacement followed, plus a series of ablations to try to control the electrical storms in her heart.
It was only later, when she thought she should be “better” and wasn’t, that she realized something deeper was going on. Her physical heart was being treated, but her inner life was fraying.
The book she eventually wrote for children grew out of what happened next.
And the more I listened, the more I thought: this is exactly the story many adults need, but rarely let themselves hear.
The Garden of the Heart
Somewhere in the middle of her medical maze, Shea reached a place of quiet desperation. She’d done everything the doctors asked. She’d tried the meds, endured the shocks, consented to procedures. Yet the AFib kept coming back. After one particularly hard surgery, instead of relief she felt defeated—tired in her body, foggy in her mind, and discouraged in her soul.
A friend invited her to a Bible study. The stories about Jesus weren’t new in content, but they were new in impact. He stopped being a distant religious figure and began to feel…human. Relatable.
Another step came when she began seeing a Christian spiritual therapist—someone who combined emotional work with explicitly Christian spiritual practice. Together, they began revisiting her early medical traumas: the first IVs, the hospital sights and smells, the seven-year-old terror.
In those sessions, something surprising happened.
As they prayed and worked through those memories, Jesus kept showing up—in her imagination at first, but in a way that felt strangely mutual. She realized she wasn’t just “doing a visualization exercise.” She was being drawn into a real relationship.
The place where this happened most clearly, for her, was what she calls “the garden of my heart.”
At first, it was a simple image: a garden inside her where she could meet Jesus. Over time, that image deepened:
- It became a space where she could be honest—about fear, about anger, about weariness.
- It became a place of companionship—where she sensed that He wanted to meet with her as much as she wanted to meet with Him.
- It became, in her words, a restoration of what the first garden in Genesis symbolized: communion between God and a human being.
As she put it to me, “Every time I intentionally went in—whether it started with my imagination or just a quiet sense—I realized I was being drawn to Jesus, and He was drawing me to Himself.”
Listening to her describe that, I had a very personal reaction.
For years, in our own children’s classes, my family has used a line from a small devotional text:
“O friend, in the garden of thy heart, plant naught but the rose of love.”
We’d help kids memorize it, put it on bookmarks and fridge magnets, and talk about what it meant. To hear Shea, from a completely different background, use the exact same phrase—“the garden of your heart”—for her encounter with Jesus was deeply moving.
It felt like one of those “fractal patterns” we’ve talked about on the show: God using the same imagery with different people in different places, weaving together a story larger than any one tradition.
Blake’s Story (Which Is Really Ours)
Out of that garden experience came Shea’s children’s book, Jesus Can Heal My Heart.
The main character is a boy named Blake who, like Shea, is facing heart surgery. He’s scared. He doesn’t feel well. His emotions are all over the place, and he doesn’t know what to do with them.
A friend notices and says, in effect, “I know who you need to talk to. His name is Jesus. You can find Him in the garden of your heart.”
The rest of the story traces Blake’s journey:
- He goes looking for this “garden” inside.
- He meets Jesus there and begins to talk with Him—about his fear, his sadness, his questions.
- When the day of surgery comes and fear spikes again, he remembers where he can go. He invites Jesus into that moment.
- After surgery, at home in recovery, that relationship continues. Jesus doesn’t disappear once the physical crisis passes.
The surgery itself is almost minimal in the book. It’s the relationship that matters.
In the final pages, Blake goes back to school. He sees another boy standing off to the side, excluded from the game. When he invites him to play, the boy says something like, “The other kids don’t want to be my friend.”
Blake’s response mirrors what his friend did for him:
“I know someone who does want to be your friend.”
He then introduces this second boy to the same Jesus he met in the garden of his heart.
It’s a simple story structure, but there’s a lot going on:
- A child learns he’s not alone in fear.
- He discovers that God is not just “out there” but present within—in a way that’s emotionally real, not just doctrinally correct.
- He begins to act out of that new security—extending friendship to someone on the margins and then sharing the hope he’s found.
When I step back from that and look at my own life, and at the lives of many adults I know, I’m struck by how often we need exactly the same three moves:
- Permission to feel the fear, the grief, the confusion.
- A way to meet God that is not purely intellectual—something that engages the heart, not just the head.
- An outlet for the comfort we receive—a chance to become conduits of hope rather than cul-de-sacs.
That’s not just “kid stuff.”
That’s discipleship.
When Medicine Stops Being God
One of the most honest things Shea said in our conversation was this:
“In my life, the medical system had become God.”
She didn’t mean that she was ungrateful for doctors. Quite the opposite. Without pediatric cardiology, growth hormone therapy, valve replacements, and skilled electrophysiologists, it’s unlikely she’d be here at all, let alone playing pickleball and doing book signings.
But somewhere along the way, the system had become ultimate. Obedience to the next procedure, the next drug, the next specialist opinion became the unquestioned center of her universe.
If doctors couldn’t fix it, she concluded, then maybe she was simply doomed.
Part of her spiritual healing was recognizing that medicine is a tool, not a master.
God, she came to believe, remains the “great physician.” He can work through human physicians. He can also lead a person to say yes to some interventions and no to others. And He can hold us in seasons where nothing seems to be working the way we’d hoped.
This isn’t an argument against medicine. It’s an argument against idolatry.
I’ve wrestled with this in my own way—from growing up in a community that was suspicious of medical care, to later seeing its necessity and value, to also recognizing the “medical-industrial complex” realities: profit incentives, chronic-symptom management, and the quiet ways industry can become a functional savior.
Shea’s story offers a middle path:
- Seek competent care.
- Recognize the limits and biases of the system.
- Ask, honestly, where you’re placing ultimate trust.
- Let God, not the hospital, define who you are.
It’s no accident that when Shea finally surrendered her need to be in control of outcomes, and stopped treating AFib as a personal verdict, she began to experience a different kind of peace. Her physical healing has continued—remarkably, the AFib has not returned—but the deeper shift was internal: “This is my journey, but it’s not my identity.”
Echoes of the Heart
Today, Shea is moving from patient to guide.
Her website, Sheaodom.com, is designed not just to showcase a book, but to serve as the seedbed for a ministry she calls “Echoes of the Heart.” Her vision is to:
- Come alongside families whose children are facing surgeries or chronic illnesses.
- Help kids and parents discover their own “garden of the heart” with Jesus.
- Offer one-on-one coaching and simple practices that make spiritual connection feel accessible, not mystical or out of reach.
Jesus Can Heal My Heart is the first expression of that. She’s already thinking about follow-up children’s books:
- One about identity—“My Identity in Jesus”—to help kids see themselves as more than diagnoses, grades, or social status.
- Another about God as Father, using the same characters, to unfold that aspect of the relationship.
She’s also beginning to step into more public spaces:
- Book signings (her first at a local San Marco bookstore, with copies now in a nearby Barnes & Noble).
- Participating in heart-walk events for congenital heart communities.
- Sharing her story on podcasts and, yes, Sunday morning livestreams like ours.
None of this is coming from someone who’s had an easy road. It’s coming from someone who’s known hospital gowns, fear, and the temptation to give up.
That, I think, is why her children’s book lands so deeply—even for adults.
It’s not a Hallmark card. It’s a distillation of lived theology:
- Jesus is present in the garden of your heart.
- You can talk with Him about fear, shame, hope, and pain.
- The surgeries and diagnoses are not the whole story.
- The comfort you receive is meant to flow outward, not stop with you.
The pediatric ward turns out to be a classroom for all of us.
Sneak Peek at Next Week’s Show
Next week on Created in the Image of God, I’ll be joined by Don Britton, a man who has spent over forty years studying Scripture with one burning question:
“How can all these churches be right when half the things they teach aren’t even in the Bible?”
His journey started, not in an ivory tower, but in personal crisis: his second wife leaving him because of his own adultery. As a broken man, he went to God, not to justify himself, but to ask, “What do You really want from me?”
Out of that came a very different kind of walk with God—and eventually a book that tackles:
- The “myth of the worship service” (worship as lifestyle, not just 10 a.m. Sunday).
- The confusion around grace vs. works.
- The origins of the “sinner’s prayer.”
- And the popular but, in his view, unbiblical notion of unconditional eternal security.
What struck me, though, was not the controversy of his topics, but the heart behind them: a desire to help people move beyond church culture into a personal, intimate, wholehearted relationship with God that brings genuine peace.
If you’ve ever wondered how to sort through competing church claims, or what it means to know God for yourself rather than just through your denomination, you won’t want to miss Episode 233 with Don Britton.
Join us next Sunday at 7 a.m. Central.
