Be careful what you ask God for, He just might answer, and it's probably not going to be in the way that you think, in your time frame and you will probably not be ready for Him to do what He's gonna do anyway, simply because you prayed a prayer which is in line with His perfect will. I'm not talking about the “I need a parking place” prayer here, this is the kind of prayer that changes lives...
Denise and I prayed one of these prayers a little while ago. Something along the lines of "God, we feel called to create stuff, but we're stuck in the rat race and can't get out. You know that when we get home from work we're so tired and there is no creativity left, so God, please make a way to get us out of the insane lives we have gotten ourselves into so we can do what you've called us to do"
Sound like a safe prayer to pray? NOT ON YOUR LIFE !!!!!
Denise was a estate agent for a year. During the week, when I got home she was generally on the way out the door and in order to spend time with her, I would usually go with, and often we would get back at 8 - 9 o'clock at night. On the weekends we would run the entire weekend. I found I would go to my job for a rest, and since my job is anything but restful, you can only imagine how nuts things were. So we had no life for a year and a bit. We prayed about this and felt like God was saying to leave, but we were having a big problem with that. Eventually, Denise's boss called her in and asked her to leave. It was a personality clash in a lot of ways, It was not that Denise wasn't a good agent, actually she was more her best agent. Add to this the fact that Denise doesn't smoke and her boss chain smokes, actually, we're surprised that she hasn’t' gassed herself yet. Anyway she expected Denise to sit in the office and be a team player when everyone else was smoking and she wasn't. So she used to work from home and the boss didn't like not having control over her. Denise was her best signing agent at the time, but since we realise there are principalities at work and never a war against flesh, the attitude toward Denise worsened. Denise was having trouble with the word we received from God to "Jump so he could catch her" and the following scripture backup gave to us as we were trying to make this drastic move. How many of you know that you better be very sure God has told you to leave your current employment before you actually do? So Denise asked God for a sign. A week later she was asked to leave. Apparently her boss was panicking that Denise would leave her, so she wanted to do the dumping. Initially it was great, we had our sign, but Denise was still left with the emotions that come with being told to leave your job. Anyway, we know in our hearts this was of God.
So she has been out of work for a year now, and we have been living off of credit cards. For those of you reading this - warning!! Don’t try this at home !! It's not a wise way to do things. Anyway this is what we did and started praying like mad for God's will for us, including should Denise go and get another job. We felt no, we got words like jump and I'll catch you etc. So we prayed and prayed. We are big time into healthy eating and began to feel like there is a way for us to make money in this.
We began to feel God was nudging us to open a food business. We had our chiropractor telling us that we mustn't tell her about it, we must make it for her. We also had a word from a friend of ours who really prays and hears from God that we must start a business. What do we know about running a business? Nothing. No problem, do it anyway. So we started a business called Life Foods making healthy take away foods for those too busy to eat healthy.
Running a business was not in our plans for our life, we want to do creative things, how does this fit? I don't know, but it's the way God is pointing for now, so we go with it. Will it give us our free time? I can only trust that somehow it will. I mean business is busy - right? Well God knows.
Anyway last week we were in fear about this whole faith mission and just wanted confirmation that we are on the right path so we went to our pastor for advice. "Get a job, and like yesterday" was his advice. This left us in so much confusion and fear, and it felt so wrong. Not that we are not open to anything God is saying, if get a job is the next step then we are ready and reporting for duty. So after a terrible weekend, where we prayed like mad, just to overcome the insane fear, confusion and hopelessness, we came to the conclusion that God is saying we must go with the business and run. If anything, it helped to kick our butts into getting real and we also realized the fear of losing what we are standing for here is greater than the fear of it not working. I then did an update of our finances and it's totally scary. We need a huge amount of money each month to be able to pay back the debt we got ourselves into by not trusting God to supply our needs after Denise left her job. We were in so much fear, but prayed like mad only to find that God doesn't seem moved. He's like go for it and trust me. We have leant about asking people for their opinions, especially when we are asking for advice out of fear, and not by instruction from God. The only problem with that is no one seems to be at this level. So it's only Goddie and us. He has been encouraging us left, right and center so we go on.
Watch this space for a good report !!
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
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