No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t get past the 16th. It was a bummer, too, because that was less than halfway. I’m talking about Genesis, here. I mean I read it. Over and over. I studied it. I mapped locations and read definitions. But I couldn’t write a Bible Study past the 16th chapter. And that’s got to be the worst thing ever because lemme tell ya, nobody buys HALF a Bible Study. Now truth be told, we may only read half of it because we get distracted and life, and squirrels, and you know. But nobody buys half to begin with.

A year goes by. A YEAR, y’all. I tell myself at least twice I’m going to get back to it, but it just seems so… bleh. The outline. The formatting. Most of it read like bullet points, not like a heart-to-heart study.

And then one day in January… okay, this week, to be exact, I felt a restlessness in my heart. A call to come back to Genesis. I sat down and began reading read through what I’d already written with fresh eyes and I realized what was wrong.

It wasn’t me that wrote it.

Oh don’t get me wrong, I didn’t plagiarize. It was all my typing and thoughts, but it wasn’t me. It was some stuffy, dressed up in a corset and hoop skirt version of the girl who loves to hang out in jeans and a stripey blue cotton tshirt. It was 4-inch bedazzled heels on a girl who normally rocks sandals all year round. As I read through, I kept thinking, “Where’s the rest? Where’s the part that sounds like me?”

I kept trying to fit the mold of what a Bible Study looks like and forgot that God made me in a certain way, and my writing for a certain purpose. Not to fit the mold, because there is no mold. There can’t be. Because we’re not supposed to follow in someone else’s footsteps… we’re supposed to follow Christ’s.

He did the same with you, you know. When it comes to humans, He makes us all unique with a special purpose, not cookie cutter-ish. When we forget who we are, we stray from the unique path that God has for us.

So if you’re looking for the rest of Genesis, I’ve pulled it. I want it to come back as one coherent piece, not cookie-cutter. And the posts currently posted will be revised. Karen-ified, if you will. I think you’ll like the finished product.

In the meantime, I want to encourage you to not be afraid to be the unique you that God created. We were created to fill a specific void – if you’re not you, you can’t fill that void, now can you? You surely can’t fill someone else’s void, because they’re filling it!

I’m off to finish Genesis. Go be you. You can do it. I’m cheering for you.

XOXO,

Karen