God Intersections

For most of 2010 God and I have had a running dialogue regarding how to describe what Godintersections.com and Leadership Productivity Forum’s are actually all about. You all have heard me use phrases like:

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

In these challenging times fear is something we deal with regularly. Fear that we won’t pay the bills, fear that we might get sick, fear difficult things will happen to our loved ones, fear that we won’t get that new deal we are working on, etc. Fear, of course, causes pain particularly as it worsens. And I’m talking to lots of people these days whose fear and pain are causing their everyday lives to be very challenging.

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

What an interesting journey this Trusting God is!!!!  It has been over two years since God asked me “Will you trust Me?”.  I suspected the journey would be difficult and in some sense I was right.  But not in the way I thought.  The hardest part in working with people on this journey is helping them “Find the End of Themselves”.

No worries, I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about me. The question of the day is “How many more ship sinkings, oil well blow outs, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami’s, stock market meltdowns etc. will it take before I learn to surrender?”.

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.

Interesting times we live in.  My wife was laid off again this past month.  My business just experienced its first slow down.  The bills march on and God is still challenging me to trust Him.  Interesting!

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.

That’s the question of the day.  Do YOU need help? If so when and from whom and for what kind of things?  As I’ve pondered lately this question seems to be at the heart of the man and God question.  Most folks I talk to believe in God.  But do you believe in a God that actually helps you?  Do you believe in a God that cares about you?  Do you believe in a God that actually shows up in your life?

This has been an amazing week of God Intersections for me.  My normal “vital activity” every week is to meet with three God Intersections.  The purpose of those meetings is to simply hear where folks are at (everyone has a story), model what God is doing in my life and find out how I can help.  This week I’ve had over 15 intersections (a record) all around a fairly common theme.  That theme is “my business (or life) is NOT working very well”.

Transforming our lives into it’s best possible version is of great interest to many of us.  We are tired of the same old life, same old pain, same old results.

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.

As I pondered my learnings from 2009 I realized what a rich year it was. God imparted more things to me during 2009 than any previous time I can remember. Things like:

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.

Well it’s the day after Christmas and all is very quiet around the Miller household. The ladies are shopping, the young men are sleeping and I’m writing. It has been weeks since my last blog. I’ve been kind of blocked and probably lazy.
This week has been interesting and I’m glad to see it behind us:

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”.