A friend bought me the book 66 Love Letters for my birthday. It’s an amazing book with letters from God about each book of the bible. If you have a chance to even just read the prologue of this book, it’s worth it. So powerful.

The first Love Letter in the book is about Genesis and I thought it would be interesting to read through it before I moved on in the book. I don’t think that I’ve ever read through Genesis from beginning to end. As I was reading yesterday I came to the end of Chapter 4 where it lists Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel…all these guys and how many years they had lived. At the end of each descriptive paragraph of these men it says “Altogether, ___ lived ___ years, and then he died”. There’s eight men that it says this exact same thing with. “Altogether, Seth lived for 912 years, and then he died”.

Each paragraph is the exact same information, the mans name, how many years he lived before he had a certain son, how many years he lived after he had that son, the amount of years he lived all together and then that he died.

Until it gets to Enoch.

Enoch lived 65 years before he had his son Methuselah (Gen. 4:21). And after he had Methuselah, Enoch walked with God for 300 years. Enoch walked with God and then he was no more, because God took him away (Gen. 4:24).

All these other men had lives and wives and children and lived for hundreds of years and then they died. But Enoch had a life and wife and children and he walked with God for hundreds of years, and then he was quietly taken up to heaven.

As I read this I thought “That’s who I want to be”. I want to be the person that when people look at me, they know that I am set apart from the world around me. That I am walking with God. I want to be that name on the list of my heritage that when people look at it, they know I was different, that I walked with God and then after I had walked my life with God, I went to be with God.

And then I thought “Well how do you do that?” Walking with God, just like walking in general, is an intentional habit and effort. It’s putting one foot in front of the other, it’s making the effort to get out of the door, it’s getting up early and getting the dogs leash and putting on a winter coat to walk outside whether you feel like it or not. It’s knowing that the walk with make you feel good, that when you come back, you’ll be refreshed and you’ll be so glad you did it. Walking is making a decision to be healthy. To enjoy God’s creation. To get fresh air. And all of this applies to walking in our Christian faith too.

We can’t just read this verse and think “Yeah, I want to be like that, God make me like that, make me like Enoch” and expect to sit back and it will just happen. We need to read it and know that Enoch made intentional steps each day to walk with God and when he made those steps he was actually walking with God! God met Enoch and walked beside him for 365 years.

Enoch was just a regular man in a list of other regular men. He had the same human issues as all of us do. He had hard days, fights with his spouse, children to raise, money to earn…but he walked with God and God walked with him. The fact that there were men listed before and after him and it doesn’t say these men walked with God shows that Enoch made an extra effort, it was choice he made to walk with God, it wasn’t something that just happened. Every other man lived their lives and did what every other man did, had children, lived a lot of years and died, but Enoch chose and made the effort to walk with God his entire life.

Every single day, are you choosing to walk with God?

Are you making that effort to take one step after the other each day?

What are you doing to set yourself apart from the lists of people around you and walk with God?

Take it one step further: What is in your life that is taking away from your time with God and what are you going to do about it?

If you want to walk with God, it’s going to take some effort. You might have to change your schedule, you might have to wake up earlier, you might have to start listening to different music, you might have to start hanging out with different friends…but if you want to walk with God and be known in your family history as someone who walked with him, making these changes will be rewarding. Drawing closer to him will make you feel more whole and you will feel more alive than ever. Not only that, but as you draw closer to God and make an effort to walk with him, he will draw close to you and walk beside you.

God’s still writing a book. Genesis might have been the beginning of the Bible and Revelation the end of it, but there’s still a book in God’s hands that he is writing in. And when you’re able to read your history in that book, will you be happy with the story that is laid out, or will you cringe at the legacy you left behind?