Illustrated Faith | Martha Bonneau

Happy Tuesday! Sorry I am running late with this post,  I ran into a couple technical issues!! Today I have an amazing guest to share with you! Martha is someone who I have admired outside this journaling bible community. Her eye for graphic detail draws me RIGHT in! So when she got involved with this I was just over the moon!! 

Follow Martha on IG

(p.s. isn't she the cutest!?!) 

When Shanna asked me to share my journaling Bible pages and a little bit about my process my immediate reaction was “of course, count me in!”.  As soon as I hit send on my email, the doubt started to sink in.  Until a year and a half ago, I could count on 1 hand how many times I had entered a church.  Religion was not a part of my life growing up.  I am extremely private (despite my tendency to over-gram on IG!) and it is not a part of my life that I have openly shared with others until I started my journaling Bible.  Would what I had to share have validity in the eyes of those who were so much more seasoned in their journey with God?  Would I use the right terminology, phrasing etc.?  I then remembered that my journey with my journaling Bible started with casting off fear so here I am, sharing a glimpse of my newfound relationship with His word through my journaling Bible.

I first sought out a church almost 2 years ago about a year after adopting our daughter from China.  She was the reason I wanted to find a church to attend.  I know that there will come a time in her life when she questions why she had to lose her birth family, her culture, the country that she was born in and so much more to become our daughter.  You hope and pray that your love as a parent will be enough, but I wanted to lay an additional foundation of love and support for her.  She not only needs to know how much we love her, but how much God loves her so I enlisted the help of a friend to help us find a church. A friend who lives out of state who I met through scrapbooking several years ago.  A friend who gifted me with a Bible several years ago that had sat on a shelf untouched. A friend who knew me well enough to know what my comfort level was and found the perfect church for us.  Almost 2 years later what started as an effort to support my daughter has in turn been of great comfort and support to me as well.  That surprised me as I am fiercely independent to a fault.  “I’ve got this” “I can do it myself” “Don’t worry, I can handle this” were my mantras, but as a first time parent to a child from a hard place who had lost everything I started to realize that maybe support wasn’t such a bad thing. To quote Gru from Despicable Me “light bulb!”  During all of this, my Bible that my friend had given me had moved from the shelf to my nightstand and then to the drawer of my nightstand where once again it sat untouched.  And then I discovered Shanna’s journaling bible on Instagram and once again “light bulb!”  The disconnect fell away instantly!  I express myself best through visual means, I am not a talker…at…all, but give me stickers and pens, and pretty paper and I am in my comfort zone.  There was no hesitation, I dove in immediately and found an immediate connection to the process and more importantly, His word.  

The first few pages I completed focused on letting go of fear and trusting Him.  The first page was for me, to help me trust in the process and let go and realize that “He’s got this” as opposed to “I’ve got this”.  My favorite page so far has been the one I completed to commemorate how far we have come with our daughter.  I never documented any of the hard stuff we went through during the first few months as a family so by journaling in the margins of John 4:18 “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts our fear.” and John 4:19 “We love because He first loved us.”  I was able to celebrate that we had come through on the other side solidly intact as a family by the grace of God. 

As a paper crafter for several years, I already had most of the supplies on hand to get started, the only investments I made were a journaling Bible with margins to work in and a couple of Frixion erasable pens.  My go to supplies are die cuts, letter stickers, rub-ons and stamps,  along with my favorite tools which are my small scissors and Tiny Attacher.  I keep everything in a small basket on my scrap table along with my notebook I take to church with my sermon notes.  I now actually take notes and feel so much more connected to each week’s message!

I cannot thank Shanna enough for sharing her process and her heart with us.  She is so supportive and generous with her time and resources and is fostering such a wonderful community through the FB group.

Thank you so much Martha for sharing your heart in a way that so many of us can relate! You are such an inspiration and I can't wait to see what you are up to next! Martha was sweet enough to provide this drop dead GORGEOUS printable for all of you today!!!

See, I told you she was amazing!!!

 You can check out more of her designs at her store, Panda Eight. 

Thank you so much Martha!

For those of you new to the journaling bible idea I want you to know that I am working on a FAQ, getting started post but wanted to point you in a couple directions to start, first off a lot of us are using the ESV journaling bible, and have recently fallen in love with Writing in the Margins (which puts into words exactly how I feel!), and we would LOVE to have you join us in our facebook group!!

I hope you enjoyed this post as much as I have and show Martha support for sharing her heart today, it's not easy but so important! Have an amazing day!

go.be.inspired.

Shanna