When I started my blog about women in the Bible, http://evessisters.blogspot.com, I couldn’t stop thinking about these women of yesteryear. Sometimes I’d even wake up dreaming about one of them, and throughout each day, I’d often find one or more of them intruding upon my thoughts. Uninvited, Eve or Hannah or Dorcas would come waltzing in and stay there until I learned more about her and wrote her story.

And writing her story wasn’t sufficient. I then had to apply it to the life stories of the women living in today’s era. Yes, “had to” is the right terminology. For a season, I was consumed with these women. Before long, I could spot certain psychological principles at work in their day-to-day behavior, and many times I’d think something like, “If only Jane Doe could show a little bit of Esther’s courage, Naomi’s strength, or Abigail’s gumption, she’d be so much happier!”

Things have changed now. While I’m still interested in the women of the Bible and what lessons we can learn from them, I’m no longer held hostage by them. I’m free to move on to other topics, and I have (more on this later). I’ve been wondering how, after reading and writing about Leah, Rizpah,and Sarah for nearly three years, I can so easily move on, and now I think I understand why.

The answer came in a book I’ve been reading by Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Against Wind and Tide. It’s a compilation of her journals and letters from 1947 – 1986, and as her daughter stated in the introduction, “she was an explorer of the world outside herself as well as the world within….her writings touch readers deeply to this day.”

In one passage, AML has come to the end of a book she’s been working on and states that as long she can find something to insert or change or edit, she feels hopeful. When she nears the end of what I call a “project,” however, she begins to lose her vision and sees the book as a total failure. ”But then, I always feel this way at the end of every book. One outgrows books in the process of writing. One outgrows the problems in them, which become stale, bromidic, unimportant. As Jung says somewhere, we don’t solve problems, we outgrow them.”

While I don’t think the topics covered in Eve’s Sisters have become stale, I think maybe I’ve learned what I needed to learn about these extraordinary women. I’ll continue to study their lives, motivations, relationships, challenges, and lessons, but I think writing about them has served its purpose: to make me aware that the women who walked the earth so many centuries ago in a faraway land were more like me (and you too!) than I’d ever before considered.

Pondering the many ways that Biblical dealt with life’s issues and challenges can provide more insight than the best-selling self-help book on today’s market. I’m hoping that the folks who read Eve’s Sisters will agree with me!