My incredible roommate Emma Ruby has always been artistically talented and ambitious for her age. As a young teen, she started her own blog where she expressed her creative talent through words, although she knew she had a gift for painting as well. When she was 15 years old, she got the idea, with the help of some inspiration from Pinterest, to try painting Bibles, and to simultaneously use that artistic exploration as an element of content for her blog.

She started off small, giving her first painted Bible to a young girl she was mentoring through a program called Bright Lights. Soon after that success, she decided to make a few new designs and try selling them through her blog and Instagram account that she created for the new company. Much to her delight, this primary launch sold out within the first few days.

Not knowing anyone who had painted Bibles before, Emma Ruby started trying this painting project from scratch and learned a lot through trial and error. She tried painting different types of covers, including hardcover, softcover and glossy, and found out soon enough that only hardcover worked for the paint. She went through a similar discovery process with the paint itself, and reflects that this process of experimentation helped her to learn to not give up or throw it away when it wasn’t working. She says “there were so many times when I thought I can not do this… but you just keep trying until it works and eventually it will work.” With that came “a lot of disasters… a lot of spilled paint, spilled water” but she says that she eventually realized “you can recover from anything.”

As Emma refined her product, she was able to connect with a local boutique called this Little Light of Mine in downtown York, PA where the owner graciously let her sell her Bibles through the shop. This helped grow her business significantly, enabling the transition from selling mainly to friends and family to having strangers reach out to her after picking up a business card at the boutique. Ultimately, through her blog, Instagram, personal networking and the boutique, she sold around 54 hand painted Bibles in the span of a year and a half before moving on to another job where she was able to save up more for college.

Though her business wasn’t the biggest, most booming or flashy startup on this blog, Emma Ruby’s entrepreneurial spirit blesses me. I love her desire to use her God given gift to inspire in people a desire to read the Bible, the very Word of God. I hope Emma Ruby’s story can be a motivator for all young Christians to decide to put their love for God into action by using their gifts, because we never know what the Lord may do with that obedience to bring glory to Himself!