My late brother Gregory Potter with our lion Ebenezer.

I’m different. So are you.

God created each of us as unique individuals with unique talents and abilities. Not everyone runs marathons. Not everyone writes books. Not everyone loves to cook, or sew, or drive race cars.

Somehow, the feminine “shopping gene” missed me. I hate shopping. When I must shop, I rush into the required store, grab what I need, and get back home to write. All I’ve ever wanted to do since I was about nine-years-old is write books.

I’m not sure when I realized I was different. Possibly in childhood. I rode my bicycle with a snake wrapped around my neck to impress the boys. I impressed them. They thought I was crazy. They were as scared of me as they were of the snake.

The buzz word in the 60s was “Generation Gap.” We didn’t have a generation gap at our house. Our entire family sat down to dinner together and engaged in conversation. It was easy for us to eschew drugs when the drug culture swept though the generation—the kids in our family were so accustomed to being different that we were immune to peer pressure.

Rock music roared to life in the 60s drowning out singers like Perry Como, Bing Crosby, Doris Day, John Davidson – and great musicals like “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Show Boat,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Flower Drum Song,” “Mary Poppins,” “South Pacific,” “Oklahoma,” and others. “Sound of Music” was the rare musical that held ground against rock music.

I never listened to Elvis Presley. When I was in high school, I lost a good friend I had made in the fifth grade because he asked me how I liked the Beetles. I told him I didn’t.

As an adult, I continued distancing myself from “normal” by climbing billboards to paint signs, mixing concrete, building with rocks—and I don’t personally know anyone else who has ever survived being bit in the stomach by an African lion or being bitten by a water moccasin—the lion because he was a “pet” and lions are wild animals, not pets, and the poisonous snake because picking snakes up by the tail in an effort to identify them is stupid.

The point is, I might be different—but we are all different. And yet we are all the same the world over because God loves all of us. Zephaniah 3:17 says of God, “He will rejoice over you with singing.”

The Lord employs the differences in me and in my life to weave into my writing. That’s my God-created blueprint. He uses and is using the differences in you and your life to construct you according to your God-created blueprint.

“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” Psalm 139: 13 & 14.

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