Professor inspires

Stuart Schwartz’s blog shares life lessons

Blogs are no longer just a hobby for soccer moms with great recipes wanting to share their 20-minute, dine-and-dash techniques with their readers. In this age, blogs provide a platform for an array of articles, from how to deal with noisy roommates to making sock puppets or dealing with difficult seasons of life.

Today, bloggers around the world share their thoughts on the struggles and celebrations of life, and Dr. Stuart Schwartz continues to honor his late wife by blogging for beliefnet.com.

According to Stuart Schwartz, a professor in the Digital Media and Communication Arts program at Liberty University, he recently started his blogging adventure with the site, which is one of the largest and most heavily trafficked Christian and religion sites in the world.

Schwartz’s inspiration for the blog came through the tragic loss of his wife, Sharon Schwartz, during the spring of 2014 due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), more commonly called Lou Gehrig’s disease. The disease is a “progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord,” according to the ALS Foundation.

“It started out when my older daughter, who is a nurse in Austin, Texas said, ‘I want mom to video record words for me,’” Stuart Schwartz said. “And if you knew Sharon, she wouldn’t go for that.”

After other suggestions, Stuart Schwartz finally settled for sitting with his wife often and simply talking to her while taking a few notes.

Stuart Schwartz reviewed the content from the conversations with his wife and wanted to help others enjoy a Hallmark movie-like “happily ever after” through every issue and predicament, no matter how tragic or seemingly insignificant.

“A Hallmark-shaped life was one of the 10 promises she had me commit to that would allow us to recover from her death … and all of the other ‘stuff’ we face every day,” Stuart Schwartz wrote in his first blog.

As Stuart Schwartz penned his wife’s words, he began to realize that she was teaching him lessons — 10 to be exact — which were similar to the teachings of Christianity.

“As I went through (my notes), I said, ‘This is Christianity. This is wonderful. There’s a lot here that can be applied,’” Stuart Schwartz said. “And (not just) in dying, in so many ways, she turned my life around.”

Stuart Schwartz said his wife taught him valuable life lessons, and he hopes to share some of those truths with the world.

“My hope is to get out there some lessons I learned from her, because she had such a great, God-centered view of things,” Stuart Schwartz said. “I hope to take some of what I learned and apply that and help other people, not just through crummy things like this, but through any kind of a difficult situation — anywhere from the death of a spouse or a child to a hangnail or a paper cut, anything that we get upset about.”

Through blogging, Stuart Schwartz wants others to be able to better deal with difficulties in life, in addition to raising awareness about ALS. Stuart Schwartz will be donating all of the money earned from his blogging experience toward the ALS foundation.

“The more readers I get, the more I donate,” Stuart Schwartz said. “I know that Sharon’s gone. There’s nothing I can do about that. But who knows, maybe someday someone else will be (helped by her words).”

Stuart Schwartz’s blog can be found at beliefnet.com/columnists.

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