Latest / The Daily Writer / Does Your Faith Help or Hurt Your Business?
Transcript
- 0:00SPEAKER_00: Hey my friend, welcome to The Daily Writer, where we help writers become authors of their own lives.
- 0:06SPEAKER_00: Well, today's podcast would normally be a straightforward kind of QA episode, but because of the sensitive nature of the topic, which is faith in God, and also to preserve the privacy of the person who I had the conversation with that inspired this episode, I'm going to take this from a little bit of a different angle.
- 0:23SPEAKER_00: Let me give you some background.
- 0:25SPEAKER_00: A few weeks ago, I got into a conversation with one of my readers about the way that faith relates to writing and business.
- 0:32SPEAKER_00: And the central question of that conversation really came down to this.
- 0:36SPEAKER_00: Does your personal faith in God ultimately help or hurt your business?
- 0:43SPEAKER_00: I have thought about this question a lot in the past couple of weeks since I was talking with this reader.
- 0:48SPEAKER_00: And my answer to this question is that it depends.
- 0:52SPEAKER_00: I believe there's a kind of faith that helps your business and also the kind of faith that hurts your business.
- 0:57SPEAKER_00: And I would describe these as an active faith versus a passive faith.
- 1:03SPEAKER_00: Let me explain what I mean by this.
- 1:05SPEAKER_00: An active faith is the kind of faith where you realize that some things are best left to God.
- 1:11SPEAKER_00: And some things, by the same token, are your responsibility.
- 1:15SPEAKER_00: For example, when I look at the things that I'm responsible for, I would put these things into that category.
- 1:22SPEAKER_00: It's my responsibility to write every day, to show up, to do the best work that I can possibly do, to serve my clients and my readers well, to be generous, to be resourceful, and to take advantage of new opportunities.
- 1:35SPEAKER_00: Now, all that being said, though, I recognize that ultimately God is in control.
- 1:40SPEAKER_00: I am not smart enough and I'm not strong enough to know everything.
- 1:44SPEAKER_00: And therefore, it's up to God to increase my business in the ways that he sees fit and to bring me opportunities that he wants me to have.
- 1:52SPEAKER_00: I've heard this saying before, and maybe you have too, which is work like everything depends on you, but pray like everything depends on God.
- 2:00SPEAKER_00: And that is pretty much my philosophy.
- 2:03SPEAKER_00: So an active faith, in other words, is one where you work hard and you try to use your full potential, but you recognize that ultimately you're not in control of everything.
- 2:14SPEAKER_00: Now, by contrast, a passive faith is a faith where you don't take action and you expect God to drop opportunities in your lap.
- 2:23SPEAKER_00: So if you don't have a blog, if you don't engage on social media, if you don't connect with people, if you don't write that book or write that material or try to connect with prospective clients, then you're not really giving God much to work with.
- 2:36SPEAKER_00: Now, do miracles happen?
- 2:38SPEAKER_00: Do unexpected things fall out of the sky into our laps sometimes?
- 2:41SPEAKER_00: Of course they do, because that's part of the mystery of life, I think.
- 2:46SPEAKER_00: But I don't think we should depend on miracles all the time.
- 2:48SPEAKER_00: I think we have to show up and do the hard work and then give God something to actually work with.
- 2:54SPEAKER_00: And I work on the principle that God blesses people who are in motion.
- 2:59SPEAKER_00: They're seeking, they're trying, they're working and experimenting, they're laboring, all with the idea of giving God our best and letting him bring results as he will.
- 3:09SPEAKER_00: In other words, we have to focus on what we can control and not worry about the rest.
- 3:14SPEAKER_00: While also recognizing that there are times when we're out of gas, we're out of ideas, uh, we've worked really hard and nothing's happening.
- 3:22SPEAKER_00: And so, therefore, that's exactly why we have to rely on God, because we can only take the ball so far down the field.
- 3:28SPEAKER_00: And if you're a person of faith, I think you would agree that, man, God's a pretty big part of this equation because we're ultimately not in control of everything.
- 3:38SPEAKER_00: So if it sounds like that, I have all this figured out, please uh trust me that I definitely don't have this all figured out.
- 3:46SPEAKER_00: Ultimately, I believe that how God works in our lives is mostly a mystery.
- 3:50SPEAKER_00: And if we claim to know the mind of God about everything, if we claim to know that we understand how God thinks and how he operates, I think that's intellectually dishonest.
- 4:00SPEAKER_00: Because if I can understand all the ways of God with my puny little mind, well, that's a pretty small God as I see it.
- 4:08SPEAKER_00: You know, I listened to a lot of Christian music back in the 90s and 2000s, and one of my favorite groups was a group called Audio Adrenaline.
- 4:15SPEAKER_00: If you listen to Christian music during that time, you might recognize that band name.
- 4:19SPEAKER_00: And they had a fantastic album that came out of the mid-90s called Bloom.
- 4:22SPEAKER_00: It's one of my favorite albums of all time, in fact.
- 4:25SPEAKER_00: And they have a song where they sing, I'm not the king, I just sing, I'm just a fraction of a thing.
- 4:34SPEAKER_00: And I love that line because it reminds us that we're all just fractions of a tiny thing.
- 4:38SPEAKER_00: God is big and God is mysterious, and we can never completely know his mind or exactly how he works.
- 4:45SPEAKER_00: And that's why, if you're a believer, I think adopting an active faith is the best course of action.
- 4:51SPEAKER_00: We do our best, then we leave the rest up to God.
- 4:55SPEAKER_00: Hey, thanks so much for listening today.
- 4:57SPEAKER_00: Keep writing, keep showing up, and I'll see you tomorrow.