1. Finding your way in challenging times using God Intersections
2. Learning to Trust God with our businesses
3. Building God’s Economy businesses
4. Growing success, finding significance.

All true but somehow a little too confining. Particularly when talking to marketplace folks who are not Christians. This year has been fascinating in terms of the dialogue and God Ideas my Intersections have created. So my Current Best Thinking is that we are all about:

1. Helping marketplace people find their way in business by involving the living God
2. Working with business leaders to learn, practice and replicate Cooperative Capitalism in our economy

The Cooperative Capitalism idea has been germinating since the beginning of 2010. It crystallized when I attended a week long CEO Space Forum in July (www.ceospace.net) where I experienced the concept across a group of 600 people.

In summary, I believe this economic mess we are living in is self inflicted (ie. we corporately did it to ourselves). The greed and self centeredness across our world caused it. It was created in a large part by our love of destructive or predatory capitalism. By destructive capitalism I mean the marketplace concept that someone has to win and someone has to lose. In its most damaging form it means someone has to win and in the process another is damaged or destroyed. I have personally experienced this model in my 28 years in corporate America.

I believe that destructive capitalism is no longer a viable marketplace model. I also believe that it’s continued use will at a minimum elongate the Great Recession and potentially create the economic apocalypse we have heard the naysayers talking about. It is time to change the foundation of our Marketplace away from Destructive Capitalism. My choice is to move toward something I call Cooperative Capitalism.

I define Cooperative Capitalism as a free market system where we cooperate with competitors, suppliers, customers and ALL those who choose to participate in communities that share God aligned Core Values. These communities improve all of our chances of success. Cooperative Capitalism does NOT mean:

1. Everyone wins
2. Everyone profits
3. None fail
4. Success is guaranteed.

It DOES MEAN that we build our companies on Godly Core Values and live these Core Values in such a way that as many as possible prosper.

Winning does NOT mean someone else has to lose!

I know it sounds crazy but it is time for a different business model to emerge and show us a new way. More on this in the future. In the mean time I would welcome your thoughts.

What is interesting is the different ways I see people dealing with fear. They include:

1. Ignore it. Pretend everything is normal or soon will be and NEVER talk about it.
2. Blame it on someone else. In my world this usually involves blaming our president or congress or the illegal immigrants or someone else. This diverts our attention.
3. Build a thick wall around ourselves. This usually involves hiding from our true self and others, disconnecting from intimacy and meaningful conversations and largely insulating ourselves from life.
4. Working double hard to make something happen. We put our head down and work a bunch of hours on whatever the problem is. It might be sending out 100 resumes or making 100 cold calls or spending a lot of time worrying about our life. Essentially we believe that the solution will arrive if we only work hard enough.
5. Inviting God into our fear and looking for His solutions.

Only number five truly helps.

One of the many difficulties of inviting God to these challenging times is dealing with the question of suffering. If God loves me so much then why would He make me go through this? I don’t belief God caused any of this. I believe we caused this with our self centered ways and God offers us an amazing road out.

So I want to encourage you to spend some time with option 5, inviting God into your fear. The neat thing about God is that He can be found IN OUR FEAR, if we will look (actually God can be found in all our suffering if we allow Him). I call it Embracing Our Fear. And when we Embrace Our Fear, we find God’s comfort and His love and the realization that He WILL take care of us. Perhaps not the way we want to be cared for (ie. money or physical comfort or stability) but in a far more valuable way. The way that shows us His love for us is more than enough and following His Intersections brings peace and joy.

So invite God into your fear and follow the Intersection He creates in your lives.

Which is why I am headed to Louisville Kentucky this week to spend some time with new friends Conway Stone, author and professional speaker (www.dreamhigh.com) and Bruce Zoeller of The Christian Advantage. The Intersections led that way and as God really does own this GodIntersections thing I decided to go. So I will simply show up in Louisville and see how I can serve, what I can learn and what God might have in store. And then I will rest in His love for me and look for the next thing to do (remember God does His part and I do my part).

My Current Best Thinking is Trusting God starts at the end of ourselves.  Now I’ve heard that before but I had no practical idea what it meant.  God is teaching me.  The end of ourselves is the point when we determine we cannot OR will not do it on our own.  What does “not doing it on our own” look like?  It looks like moving to a place in our lives where we realize we simply can’t go on like this.  Where we realize we don’t really control the results anyway.

For most I coach it looks like deciding to quit.  For some it is simply being too tired to go on.  For some it is when life hurts too much to go on.  However we get to the point of almost hopelessness, we get there.  And then we decide SOMETHING in our life needs to change!

Ah, the moment of TRUTH!  If we are God disposed we might consider including Him.  But most of the time we simply do not know what to do.  If we stop now, without including God, we find some way to self-medicate (glass screens, recreational drugs, anger etc.) or we crawl up in a little ball, build thick walls and simply go through the motions of life.  Not a fun place.

BUT if we can find the strength to consider God, the Trust Journey is born.  And it gets harder before it gets easier.  Harder because we are now in a place of learning to let God lead, hear His prompting, find His rhythm.  And our Self fights this like crazy. Many times that means simply starting some activity that might help us to a goal.  And engaging God while we walk.  For me it is making contacts with people I have met to see how I might help.  And while you are doing the activity open yourselves to God’s presence.  And have the courage to NOT take charge again when you sense nothing.

Don’t give up. I have experienced this many times.  If you will refuse to lead, refuse to do it on your own, refuse the rat race, a Still Small Voice or God Thought or God Idea or God Intersection will show up and you have now truly started on the journey to Trusting God.  Follow it!

Let me know how I can help.  A great book to assist is “True Faced” by Bruce McNicol, Bill Thrall and John Lynch.  You can find it at www.truefaced.com.  Enjoy the journey.  The farther you travel the easier it gets.

Surrender to what? Surrender the outcome of my life and business to God! Surrender to Trusting God with my life and business every month, every week, every day and every hour.

If you have been reading this blog for a while you know that GodIntersections.com is committed to exploring 4 things:

1. Trusting God with our lives and businesses
2. Finding the way forward by reading the God Intersections on our journey
3. Forming Communities around Godly Core Values.
4. Letting those Communities sustain us through these fear-filled times.

And while I have loved my personal journey this last two plus years in unpacking and sharing these concepts, I haven’t actually believed that the concepts were critical to achieving success and significance.

That changed this past week as I continue to watch the carnage inflicted on us by our fellow man, “Mother Nature”, the financial markets, our greed etc. My Current Best Thinking is that the fear and uncertainty in our world is not going to diminish. I actually believe our best efforts to manage the outcomes of our lives will become increasingly futile.
So what are our alternatives? I see only two:

1. Attempt to Manage the Fear by gutting it out via the current world system (read increasing misery and stress and sleepless nights)
2. Learn to Trust God by exploring His Love for Us, following His Intersections and letting Him determine our outcomes.

And while it is still currently possible to survive by choosing Option 1 that is becoming increasing untenable. Surrendering our lives to God on a daily basis will become the only viable answer. In that decision is the protection we seek, the love we long for and the significance we crave.

But this is NOT an easy path. And that is why I have committed my life to walking this Trust Path.  And journeying with those who also choose to be Walkers. Let me encourage you to choose the “Trust God” path!

I would love to hear about your journey.

Mark Miller

mark.miller@Godintersections.com

Heh, the good news is it only took Glenda and me about 48 hours to work our way through the shock of another lay off.  The first 24 hours was tough, the second a little easier and now we are back to “seeing what God will do”.  And God continues to provide.

Our conversations over this last period have been many and pretty rich stuff.  We talked about how the uncertainty of these economic times makes us feel individually and as a couple, how it shakes our confidence in ourselves, how it causes us to doubt what has always worked in our lives and how it ultimately produces fear in our lives.  We also talked about how tired we are of companies steeped in fear that simply don’t seem to care about their employees and can’t see outside of their world.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have a safe place to receive affirmation and encouragement in these difficult times.

So we are going to actually do something (in addition to writing blogsJ).  We are going to invite you to a conversation.  A conversation about what is going on in your life and business and family.  A conversation both virtually via GodIntersections.com Forums and monthly via lunch discussions in the Phoenix East Valley area (yep face to face).  The ground rules will be very simple.  You can post or ask any question or make any comment as long as they fit within the following ground rules to the best of your ability:

1. You are trusting God for the results
2. You are being as Authentic as possible
3. You listen to others without an agenda for them
4. You are encouraging to others
5. You Share Your Stories not your opinions
6. You make it about serving others and not about you.

If you can answer “I am to the best of my ability” than please start or join a conversation.  The GodIntersections.com Forum you want to post to or comment on is called “Communities of Hope”.  Click the “Register” button under “Login” and I will send you a password.  Additionally we are holding our first lunch on Wednesday May 26, 2010 from 11:30-1:30.  If you are interested in attending email me at mark.miller@godintersections.com and I will send you the details.  The format will be:

1. Sharing our stories
2. One good idea and one affirmation from each of us per story
3. Eat a little while we are doing this.

So join us as we love one another back to life!

Our culture is designed to convince us that we can do life without God.  Oh we believe we need help sometimes when life gets real hard but only from a few people.  And when we do accept help that is less than the ideal situation and a sign of weakness.  We are better off being strong enough to not need anyone.  We can choose to help others, that’s a good thing.  As long as we are not the one asking for the help.  If someone notices our need we might be authentic enough to let them help us, but that is a fallback position.  So suck it up and BE STRONG!

And that is on the life side.  What about the marketplace side, the side where we work.  I have this discussion regularly with business owners.  Do they need help?  From God?  Does God care about their business?  What would His involvement look like? In most cases the answer is “I’ve never really thought about it but I’m fine”.  So let’s think about it.

Personally, I need help!  There, I said it.  I need help for my business and my relationships and my finances.  I have a great family and have always had help from them and others in my life.  And that is good.  But mostly I need God’s help. Help to show up when I can’t impact a situation or don’t know what to do or don’t have the strength to carry on or am angry and embittered by life.  I’m actually a pretty competent guy and can handle most things.  But these hard things, trying to handle them on my own, I tried that and all it did was grind me up.  And I’m done being ground up by life.  I’m committed to living “My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (matt 11:30).  And that commitment has led me to an awesome life.  A life of letting God handle the outcome, I handle the details and my hollering out “I need You” when things get tough.

Like last night around 11:00 PM when my college age daughter called with an ear ache that hurt so bad it brought her to tears.  And there was absolutely nothing I could do about it as she was 2,000 miles away.  How cool is it that I could give her the best advice I possible could (ie. take some meds, clear your sinus’ with warm salt water etc.) AND then ask the living God to be true to His word and take away the pain, allow her to sleep and cure her symptoms.  And guess what, when I talked to her about 11:00 AM this morning the pain was gone, she had slept well and her symptoms, while not completely gone, were abating.

So let’s just admit we need help, ask God to help and lead, do our part and start the journey to the life we are all looking for.  A life of peace and joy and contentment knowing that we are on a journey for God.

Have a great Easter!

As I pause on this Friday afternoon to glean the learnings from all these Intersections (I asked God) several themes came to mind.

1. Most of us are aware that our lives and businesses are not going near as well as we would like
2. We have no idea what to change in our lives to improve this situation
3. I consistently see confusion with folks about the role of Steward of our lives versus Owner
4. This confusion causes us to spend much time doing Owner activities that are far more effectively left to God
5. The wasted time is keeping us from “doing our part” so God can do His part.

To elaborate just a tad, saying “that we are NOT the Owner of our life” is much easier than doing “we are not the Owner of our life”.  Learning to let God do the Owner role in our life involves several things:

1. Awareness that we can and need to do this
2. Courage to begin to let go of controlling the outcome
3. Understanding that this is a journey that will take some time
4. Folks in our lives to encourage and support us on the journey.

Interestingly these are some of the Steps of Transformation God has unpacked for us the last couple of years.

The big loss here is in the time we spend acting like an Owner instead of using that time to become the best Steward possible of our lives.  Examples:

1. We spend time worrying about where the money will come from this month instead of simply DOING what we can to create value ultimately producing money
2. We spend time beating ourselves up for being a loser in our chosen profession because we are not seeing the results we want rather than simply doing the Vital Activities and letting God handle the results
3. We spend time pounding the folks that work and live with us to do what we want rather than loving and encouraging them to do the best they can.

Doing all of these Owner activities robs us of several precious things:

1. Time to be more effective Stewards resulting in increased harvest
2. Joy by not simply enjoying the moment instead having to freak out about the potential outcome
3. Peace of knowing God has the outcome and we can simply rest in “doing our part” every day.

So let me encourage you to join me on this journey toward being the best Steward we can be while letting God handle the “Owner responsibilities”.  If I can encourage and support you on this journey just let me know.

The million dollar question is “How does transformation happen”?  What is our role in the process?  What is God’s role in the process?

And so we begin (again?).  We search for new knowledge that will jump start the process.  We read books, go to seminars, listen to sermons, pray, read God’s word, serve when we can etc.  We do all this for the purpose, perhaps unspoken, of becoming a better version of ourselves and Jesus Christ.  And after we do all this we find we are incrementally different which we don’t mind but it seemed like a lot of work for such little change.

Over the past 18 month’s God has unpacked a process for me and a group of folks I hang out with that is proving to be a VERY effective way to be transformed.  The process is not about more knowledge, different feelings or changing beliefs.  It is about actually doing something.

The entire process is predicated on participating in small groups of people that are 100% encouraging (to a specific action) and 100% affirming (of a strength seen in you).  With this foundation the process itself is pretty straight forward.

1. Determine a Vision for your life, business or area of focus
2. Pick out one significant Goal that will get you a step closer to that Vision
3. Identify a couple of Activities that will move you to the Goal
4. Complete the Activity(s) over a specific period of time
5. Get together in your small, encouraging, affirming group and tell the story of the Activity(s) you completed (whether successful or not).

When you complete these 5 steps in your small group you will be surprised how you AND the members of the group have moved the transformational process forward (it takes time).  I can’t explain why it happens and I’m certainly not suggesting it is the only way to be transformed but it does work.

A couple of suggestions:

1. Keep the small group less than 12 members
2. Meet at least monthly
3. Determine the Core Values of the group at your first meeting (the ground rules)
4. Write down your Vision, Goal and Activities (individually)
5. When sharing the stories share the specifics of the story not just what was learned
6. When done sharing ask for encouraging and affirming feedback
7. Be patient.  Our Current Best Thinking is that this is a 3+ year process.

So give it a wing.  Start a group or try it  in an existing group and let me know how it goes.  It is working great in my life.

1. Truth does not need to be defended – God can handle it. My job is to simply love people where they are
2. God is the Owner, I am the steward of my life and business. Leave the results up to Him and simply do my part
3. God, as the Owner, will guide my life if I will simply follow the God Intersections
4. Move our businesses into God’s Economy
5. Build a Community, it is the new foundation for significance.

The synthesis of these ideas is the concept of moving our lives and businesses to a place where they best represent God and His values. In other words, becoming a “Light on the Hill” for those around us (Matt. 5:14).

I now see that consistently representing Core Values aligned with God is the single most important thing I can do to become “A Light on the Hill”. That used to sound crazy. I used to think that results were the most important thing or hard work or reading God’s Word or multiplying myself. Now I see that when I consistently represent God via my Core Values I AM being “A Light on the Hill”.

So what are Core Values anyway? They are the most important characteristics we demonstrate as seen by other folks in our lives. The core of who we are. They are NOT what we want to be or think we are. Only what other people actually see matters. For Mark Miller (me) they are:

1. Serve Others
2. Trust God for the results
3. Listen without an agenda
4. Encourage others
5. Authentic always
6. Share Our Stories

What are yours? Do you know? Have your written them down? Can you tell someone easily?

So let me encourage you to an assignment.

1. Take 10 minutes and WRITE DOWN your Core Values
2. Take your list and ask 3 family, friends or customers to make a list of what THEY SEE as your Core Values (don’t show them your list)
3. Have a discussion around the differences between the lists

Let me know how it goes!

1. Sunday we started battling the flu as a family
2. Tuesday I threw out my back (the pain was worse than any I have ever experienced)
3. Friday (Christmas) was coming without enough money
4. I wasn’t feeling much “Joy for the Jesus Season”.

As I lay awake around 4:00 AM Wednesday morning I realized that body, soul and spirit were not in good shape.  My desperate prayers lay largely unanswered, my worries about money and my health grew by the minute (we have no health insurance) and 2009 had not turned out as I had envisioned.   Isn’t it funny how the dark of the night magnifies all of our fears (now there’s an immutable law).

And so a choice had to be made.

1. Did this Trust God thing work or NOT?
2. Was I really willing to let God determine the outcome of my life?
3. What about what I wanted??
4. Why wouldn’t the pain in my back go away (God heals right?)?

I have grown to embrace those moments as opposed to fear them (that’s new in the last 2 years). I realized this was either a moment to grow or a moment to shrink back. Glenda and I experienced a whole new “turn of the wheel” about Trusting God in this last two month but this was hard!

And so I swallowed hard, gritted my teeth and told God I was pressing on, no matter the pain, sickness or lack AND He needed to do something (preferably NOW). And then………….nothing. Nothing changed, no healing, no cool visions, no supernatural words, just my pain and my wife’s regular breathing. Great, this was going well. Interestingly I did fall asleep for about 90 minutes for the first time that night.

The next morning I had to figure out what “my part” would be for that day (if I want God to do His part I have to do my part). Did I call a doctor, chiropractor, PT, 911 or what? What about the money part? What about the anxiety part? Etc. I decided to reach out to this God Intersection community for help. I called Steve Carling a Physical Therapist member of mine (carlingphysicaltherapy.com). Steve assured me he “could save my Christmas” if I could drag myself into his office. He (and God) did. My back is a thousand times better. We called a nurse friend of ours about meds and the flu stuff. We are recovering nicely. Thursday Glenda received a call for a third interview at a local CPA firm and was offered the job (full time with benefits). And Thursday night I found myself at City of Grace (www.cityofgrace.com ) for a Christmas Eve service followed by an evening shared with dear friends. [Notice how the Community we have formed supported us through all of this and I’m not listing all of the offers of support from the rest of you]. Christmas (Friday) was spent quietly with my immediate family, foster son (Frankie), a couple of movies and a great meal.

That brings us to today. As I reflect on perhaps the most difficult week of my life I am struck by how quickly it can all change for the better. I’ve learned a couple of things:

1. Don’t fear the most difficult moments.  Embrace them and Trust God.
2. Lean on your Community for support.  Reach out and ASK THEM to help.
3. Relax (to the best of your ability) and enjoy the moment(s).

I hope your Christmas was as peace filled and learning filled as mine!