It’s called Sweet Peaks, and you will never go there but you have to stand in line. You’ll need that time, though, to choose from their 16 flavors of homemade goodness. Smell the homemade waffle cones while you wait. Imagine the Hutterite ladies, in long skirts and capped heads, delivering the cream straight from Montana farms.

People rave about how good Sweet Peaks is and what flavor they chose last time.

But I have to admit that on my first trip I called those people liars.

“Strawberry-rhubarb,” they said, but all I could taste was the strawberry. I have since repented, after tasting London Fog and could discern the Earl Grey Tea from the lemon flavor. The grasshopper mint was also really good. And on the last trip I licked around a scoop of salted caramel in a sugar cone.

And then I was chatting with my writer friend, who confessed to eating the last of a carton of ice cream that her husband had found like hidden treasure at the bottom of the freezer.

“I resisted the temptation to eat it straight out of the carton,” she said, “and I did put it into a nice little white bowl and ate it all gone.”

We talked about other writers and their unique flavors and the temptation to wish we were more like one of them.

I told her I recently had read a blog post by a writer whose words are like that salted caramel ice cream, and why can’t I write like her?

“My words are more blunt,” I said. There won’t ever be any subtle texture or flavor to my writing. Call me rhubarb, which is the flavor I asked to sample at the Sweet Peaks counter a few days ago. It took a full 60 seconds for my face to take its right shape again, after that tart mouth full of ice cream. Yes, I’m definitely more rhubarb at the computer keyboard than anything smooth and caramel.

But all those flavors make different people happy. Someone loves the classic Madagascar vanilla, while another person orders lemon dill and another orders banana cayenne.

People come in flavors, too.

Homemade. We are homemade.

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.  Psalm 139:13.

God chose our individual, artisan flavors of personality.

Artisan: Made in a non-mechanized way using high-quality ingredients.

So let’s celebrate how different we are and not wish we were somebody else. I’ll be the kind of writer God made me to be. You be the kind of (fill in the blank) God made you to be.

More flavors is “more better,” as one of the ladies I work with would say.

Christy

P.S. May I suggest a summer Bible study that’s a short, online, interactive program written for the purpose of breaking down all that comparing us girls do against each other. I especially enjoy Angie Tolpin’s short video lessons, and I think you’ll appreciate her perspective on relationships. This study is especially great if your summer schedule is weird and you need something you can do from home or while you’re on vacation. Follow this link: Redeeming The Division: The Quiet Fight Between Women.