I had that desperate look in my eye. We needed help back then (we still do but it was more painful–to me–back then). I often felt that without somebody’s intervention the doors could close any day now. I mean I was doing everything that I knew how to do, working 20 hour days, covering as many positions in our young company as I could, praying, working out as my single outlet, and falling apart on the inside. The non-profit program that my family built (are building) had such massive need and yet the response to support seemed minimal to me . . . I was caught up in these thoughts until she interrupted me. She was the newest member to our advisory board. She pulled me aside for little more than seconds, and said more to me with her eyes than anything else, but her spoken message was this, “It will be OK. Don’t look like that, it will be OK.” Then she squeezed my arm and walked away. She was a successful entrepreneur in my town and had taken a moment to notice and respond to something in me. For years I pounder the words she said and the words that she didn’t say. I considered the challenges she must have faced building, maintaining and growing her business locally and nationally. I studied the concern in her eyes and I learned something. There are those who respond to need, but overwhelmingly people respond to success. They (we) want to be a part of something that works and works well.
And when I learned that I changed my focus to the fact that we are successful at raising children and in turn I changed my look and my conversation to focus on “whatsoever things are good.” My conversation about New Hope also changed, I told the stories of our success. I quit allowing my face to tell the story of my personal struggle, it tells the story of impending success. And you know what happens now? People ask me, “How can we help?”
But wait a minute! I don’t want to gloss over this truth right here! I changed the way that I pray. The Bible says that I can “come boldly come before the throne.” I learned that a portion of that boldness comes from confessing the words that I know God will respond to. I discovered that “God has an expected end for me (Jer 29:11), and that good success is an option for me (Joshua 1:8), and that men would give into me pressed down shaken together and running over (Luke 6:38), that greater is He that is in me than He that is in the world (1 John 4:4), that God is giving us a new thing and that now it shall spring forth (Isaiah 43:19), and that in unity we cannot be stopped (Genesis 11:6), and that I can do all things through the power of the Word that strengthens me (Philippians 4:13), and the list goes on and on. These are the thoughts that I chose to flood my mind with. I set a few moments aside a day to study the Words that encourage and build me up, and I take the time to restate them in MizJAI speak so that they stick to my soul and come out of me like flowing waters when I need them.
Said plain, after I ask God for something in my life, I now spend the rest of my time finding more examples of the promise that I need and want in my life and I make my confessions my conversations. This makes me bold and causes me to fear less and less and to stand harder and stronger and with more grace and expectation!
But that’s not all. The third part of the process is easy and fun, but crucial to long term success of any kind, I’ll see you guys next week.
MizJAI
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Interesting, me and my best friend has been talking about your blogs all night!