20th-century English writer · pen name of Jim Brown · author of “An Interview with God”
“James J. Lachard” was a pen name used by the English writer Jim Brown for a short inspirational piece, “I Dreamed I Had an Interview with God.” The unpublished manuscript leaked online and, after web designer Reata Strickland posted an anonymous copy on an Alabama church website in May 2001, it went viral and was published by Simon & Schuster in 2002 as An Interview with God, with Strickland credited as editor rather than author. The health-and-money passage comes from that piece — not from any speech or writing of the Dalai Lama.