Guarding Your Heart by Bob Jones

"Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it."

Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)

How would you like to be so influential as a writer that the US space program decides to name a landing place on Mars after you? Octavia Butler was a science fiction writer in the 1970s. In 2021, NASA named the Mars landing site of the Perseverance rover the "Octavia E. Butler Landing" in her honour. Why?

Octavia

First, have you ever heard of Octavia? I hadn’t. But I discovered she held a key to how to guard your heart.

I heard of Octavia in January through a podcast, "Redeeming Babel." The topic was Ray Bradbury's science fiction classic, Fahrenheit 451. How eerily similar the content is to what is unfolding in the US in 2025. But that is a topic for another blog. The speaker championed the science fiction writer, Octavia Butler.

Simple research showed she was acquainted with grief of many kinds but never, ever quit. Her father died when she was seven. Her mom bought her a typewriter when she was ten, even though the cost was steep for a single parent. And what ten-year-old wants a typewriter? Someone who would persist in her writing regardless of how many setbacks she faced.

Octavia grew up believing that she was "ugly and stupid, clumsy, and socially hopeless.” She was painfully shy and suffered from dyslexia which made her a target for bullies. The library became her safe place and reading science fiction, her escape. She persevered in her passion to write science fiction from the time she was a teenager.

"I began writing about power because I had so little."

Decades later, her name became synonymous with patience, practice, and persistence. A literary superstar. She shattered expectations and barriers in becoming the first Black woman to be awarded multiple prizes for science fiction writing. Posthumously, a landing site on Mars was named after her.

Octavia’s secret

She guarded her heart.

When teachers interpreted her reading slowness due to dyslexia as unwillingness, she asked her mom for a library card so she could read out of school.

She carried a big notebook to write down thoughts and stories. At age thirteen she submitted her first story for publication. She was over the moon when it appeared in a science fiction magazine.

Despite a lack of natural talent, rejection, prejudice, social anxiety, and setback, after setback she persisted with an optimism that overcame every obstacle.

Persistence

At the height of her career, Octavia, or Estelle as her family knew her, made these remarkable statements: “Forget talent. If you have it, fine. Use it. If you don’t have it, it doesn’t matter. As habit is more dependable than inspiration, continued learning is more dependable than talent. Never let pride or laziness prevent you from learning, improving your work, changing its direction when necessary. Persistence is essential to any writer—the persistence to finish your work, to keep writing in spite of rejection, to keep reading, studying, submitting work for sale.”

She protected her emotional well-being by setting limits with people and situations that would drain her energy.

During her 59 short years, she maintained a kind and empathetic attitude towards herself and others.

There is a lesson in her life for how to engage the toxic social, ethical environment we live in and how Christians in general and writers in particular need to guard their heart while being a voice for justice and mercy.

She challenged me. How does Octavia’s story influence you?

Thank you for reading. Empathetic Christian writers have never been needed more than now.