Guest Blogger Sara Goetz – Lies About Success

Two lies about success: 

1. Success should come overnight
2. If it doesn’t, you don’t deserve to be in the industry.

I know it’s ludicrous. Even typing the words makes me say, “duh! That’s ridiculous!!!!” inside my mind. But I have been held captive by these erroneous beliefs and want to call them out for what they are – lies that interfere with the work God wants to do through our businesses and in changing our lives. 

 

You may not be quite as impressionable as I am. It might be easier for you to stand unmoved against the tide of instant success or be strong in the midst of your peers seemingly running laps around you. But I get discouraged. And I begin to doubt myself. So I look for the truth. Here’s what I find:  

1. Success is obedience to God in everything we do. 
2. It is God’s will – not other’s perception of our worthiness – that determines our place in the industry.

Again, I am a champion of a strong business plan, powerful branding, frugal spending, low overhead, and responsible risk taking. But I am a slave not to our cultures affinity with instant success but rather a slave to obedience to God. My worthiness, deservedness, and success is redefined in light of the objectives God has for my life. 

 

Obedience, not instantaneous success, is the objective. And it is an objective that is connected with eternal success & blessings. I’ll take that over instant success any day.

Love @ Work is Patient

 We’re quite prepared to love others so long as they shape up quickly to our expectations. “Love is patient” says 1 Corinthians 13:4. That’s not the kind of love most of us experience on a daily basis is it?

After the roaring success of my series on the Fruit of the Spirit @ Work (success, that is, in helping me to see how far I have to go yet) I thought I’d write a related series on love, from the famous “love chapter” of the Bible - 1 Corinthians 13. Starting from the top … “love is patient”.

Actually this is also part of the fruit of the Spirit and I somewhat addressed it in http://faithatworkplace.blogspot.com/2010/04/fruit-of-spirit-work-patience.html. Focusing a bit more on how this is an attribute of love (the “agape” kind that is unique to Jesus and those who have His Spirit) gives a slightly different twist though. In the workplace, it says a lot about how we look at our co-workers, and it comes from looking at them through God’s eyes, as it were. We see people who are created uniquely by God, who have challenges that are different from ours, but no less difficult. We see people who have different personalities, skills, motivations, and experiences. We also see people who are no less (but no more) fallible than us – in other words, people who are equally prone to sin.

When we see these things, it is easier to be patient. When an employee doesn’t immediately respond to some coaching, we will take the time to find out why. Of course, it could be that they simply refuse and then consequences may be necessary – but even then, it is in the realization that their sin is no worse than ours. When a colleague doesn’t pull their weight, leaving us more than our share of the work, patient love will tell them how we feel but without rancor and without condemnation. Patient love is perfectly entitled to ask for more help, but is willing to forgive, and to forgive, and to forgive. If work that needs to be done isn’t getting done, we may have to take other action when it becomes clear nothing will change, but we do it as constructively and supportively of our colleague as possible.

This gets difficult. I have an employee who struggles with getting done things that are new to him – he tends to put them to one side rather than focusing on determining how to approach the problem, or asking for help. We’ve talked about this before, and my boss has lost patience. If my love for him is to be patient, I need to take the time (patience by definition seems to include giving some of my time) to help him understand the issue, to encourage him to have the confidence to try, and to stay on top of his progress. I started that today. By God’s grace (but not my own efforts) I can continue.

If we’re to exhibit the love of God at work, and it is clear to me that we’re called to do so as a part of our Kingdom mission, then we need to be patient. And that’s just the beginning …

Theology @ Work – Redemption

Do you want to know why your daily work is important? Think redemption!

We Christians talk a great deal about “redemption”, we call Christ our Redeemer, and some of us also talk about God’s plan to redeem Creation. But what do we mean by redemption? Interestingly, although all these themes are found in Scripture, they often use words different from redeem or redemption. These words are almost legal terms – speaking of buying back something that had been pledged (in a time of poverty, for example), or of the buying back and freeing of slaves.

Paul probably speaks more about this image of Christ’s working being the price for our being bought back, and most Christians focus on the individual aspect of freedom from slavery to sin that is a key part of our salvation. This is vital of course, but if we look at the whole sweep of Scripture, it may have even more to do with God’s plan to buy back all of Creation. We’ve seen in these posts how God created a heaven and earth, and creatures within them, that were “very good”. We’ve seen that the corruption of sin, typified in the Fall, has moved all of Creation away from God’s purposes. Israel was created and chosen as God’s people, with the goal of “blessing” all nations – I believe in large part that means pointing them back to God’s intent for them, and working on the restoration of what He had made. Israel failed (largely) but from them came the Messiah, Jesus the Christ, who became the “ransom” or redemption price for all who would turn to Him, so that from Him the Church would be created and take over the task of “blessing all nations” – that is the task of working in partnership with God to restore, to recover, to redeem all of God’s Creation.

That’s what our daily work is all about. We’re on a mission of redemption, made possible because we have individually and corporately been redeemed through the sacrifice of Jesus. When Paul says that “we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do” (Eph 2:10) he is saying that as new creatures, redeemed and restored to His original intent for us, we are to do “good works” (restoring a “good” Creation) in His Name. Every daily activity is a part of this call. It is our job to bring back the lost, to recover the potential God put in all of us, to restore the beauty of Creation – in short to build the Kingdom, the work in progress that will become the “new heaven and new earth” (see Isaiah chapters 65 and 66 and Revelation 21 and 22).

Is that important enough for you?

Guest Blogger Sara Goetz – Business as Transformation

What if business wasn’t just about making money. What if it was about transformation?

In 5 years of steady growth with our business I know this for certain: God did not invite me into Sara Goetz Photography to change the photography & small business community – although, I would have really liked that.

He invited me into small business ownership so that He could change me.

God has used our small business to grow me up, to teach me about faith and priorities, to confront my weaknesses, and to strengthen my marriage.

In sum. He has made Sara Goetz Photography into a sanctifying experience. Really! It’s true! Only God could use a business as a means of sanctification. Who would have guessed?

Sara Goetz Photography will never simply need more office space, faster computers, or a bigger marketing budget. Well it might, but none of those things will in and of themselves help me to fulfill God’s purpose for this venture in my life.

Instead, it requires that I continually lay it down at the feet of Him who has the imagination, vision, and resources to let it make me more into the woman I was created to be.

We have not neglected a business plan, abandoned revenue goals, or neglected profit margin. We have all of those and we have set high expectations for what our business will do financially for our life. We do not give away our services. Instead I strive to make offering our services about becoming more like Christ – about being changed. So that the art and practice of Sara Goetz Photography is a worshipful experience that pleases the heart of God – and begins to change my heart to be more like His.

After all, what good is a successful business if I am unchanged before God?

Introducing Guest Blogger Sara Goetz

Over the next few weeks I'll be posting a few pieces from my friend Sara Goetz, who owns and operates a photography business in the San Francisco East Bay. Since I have never run my own business, I don't have a good insight into the challenges facing entrepreneurs and small business owners. Sara has been giving this some thought, and has written some very helpful, honest and through-provoking pieces on the exercise of faith in a business owner's own workplace. Her own blog can be found here: http://www.blog.saragoetzphotography.com/. Thanks to Sara for these contributions!

Distracted @ Work

The Faith @ Work blog has gone a bit quiet recently – I confess to having been focused on my daughter’s wedding (it was awesome!) This raises the question for me about distractions in general.

I don’t know about you, but I find it pretty hard to stay focused on any one thing at work. To some degree it’s a good thing – we have so many balls in the air that if we just watched one the rest would all drop. But multi-tasking and allowing distractions to take charge are not the same thing. Multi-tasking has its own dangers – to use an IT memory management analogy – we can easily end up “thrashing” – spending so much time switching between tasks that there isn’t enough time to do the tasks themselves. A bigger issue, at least once we’ve learned some basic time management techniques, is completely non-work distractions to take over.

I love sport, and the sport I love most is cricket. At any point in the day there is usually an interesting cricket match going on somewhere in the world and I confess that I often keep track of them. This actually works in my favor while it stays in control – it is a stress reliever and quick pause from intense activity. But the risk is that I get too engaged in the cricket (or currently the World Cup) and work suffers. How do I keep this in balance?

Then there are other issues and anxieties – the broken sprinkler system that caused flooding of my back yard and a neighbor’s while we were away for the wedding, for example. Or family conflicts. Or sermons to be written or church issues to be concerned about. There is a place for each of these, and keeping balance between all of the demands on my attention is a struggle. Does my faith have anything to say about all this?

I believe the spiritual fruit of self-control comes into play here (see my post from last month - http://faithatworkplace.blogspot.com/2010/05/fruit-of-spirit-work-self-control.html). Paul says “we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5). Even though ripped a little out of context, this speaks so well to what I need to be able to do at work. This isn’t easy, and it probably can’t be done simply as an act of the will. I need to develop the habit of seeking the release of the Spirit’s fruit of self-control, so that He in me will give me the ability to control my thoughts to focus on the Kingdom work I have been given in the workplace.

Memorandum to self: start examining distractions, offering them to God in prayer, and getting them under control by the Spirit.

Prayer @ Work – People

Marilyn Manson has a song called “Don’t Pray For Me”. Is that how most people feel? Should we be praying for co-workers whether they want it or not?

Manson’s song lyrics go something like this:

Don’t pray for me
I don’t need your sympathy
I don’t want your god protecting me
Don’t pray for me
I don’t want your empathy
I don’t need your savior saving me
Don’t pray for me

I’ve found, though, that the vast majority of people really do want to be prayed for, whether they believe in the power of their own prayer or not. Surprisingly many have the approach that though they don’t have faith in God, they have some kind of faith in our faith in God, if you see what I mean. So more and more in the workplace, I find myself listening to needs, concerns, worries and fears of my colleagues and employees, and more and more I offer to pray for them. Usually they’re not comfortable with me laying hands on them and praying the middle of the office! I’m not sure I would be either! But they are genuinely grateful for the prayer, and seem to then welcome conversation about prayer and the God to Whom I’m praying.

The key, of course, is the motivation – are we praying out of genuine compassion, concern and love for our co-workers, and in genuine belief that God loves them much more, or is this just a way into some religious dialogue? If it’s mostly the latter, they’ll see it a mile off (trust me, I know from my past!) I’ve found that regular prayer for colleagues and staff (I routinely pray for each of our employees by name and as specifically as I know how every Wednesday) changes my attitudes and relationships, and leads to more openness on their part, and more opportunity for me to bless them. This works especially well for those I don’t get on with terribly well – my need to pray for them is all the greater!

Prayer changes things – and relationships!

Prayer @ Work – People