Why Faith-Based BUSINESS?
Why are business and finance at the heart of the quest for faith?
II don’t know about you, but I always had an easy time trusting in God when I was a child and teen. Whatever I need, God will provide.
Or (ahem…) my parents will provide…
I even remember in college, fervently wishing and praying to go to Israel each year. Every year, I’d set my sight upon a particular holiday or time and then I would pray to go at that time.
And guess what? Each year, my parents decided to take a trip at exactly that time, and they took me with them! One year, it was the high holidays. Another year, it was Pesach. Another year, it was the summer, (what do you know, my sister got married in Israel.) And the last time, it was the following summer, (and what do you know, I got married in Israel.)
If you had asked me, I would have told you my faith in the Good Lord was sterling.
But guess what, have you noticed that it’s really easy to trust in God when someone else is always providing for you?
The reality? As children, we are kind of like the Jews in the dessert, being sustained by the manna, the bread from heaven. Only it’s the bread our mother bought from the grocery store and stuck in the fridge.
It’s only when we’re asked to inherit a land of our own – when we encounter the responsibilities of adult life, that we may start to realize the difficulty of trusting in God.
It’s easy to trust in God when someone else is providing for you. But when you are apparently providing for yourself? Oh boy, then it starts to get difficult.
So why Faith-Based Business? Though faith plays into how we relate to many dimensions of our lives – to accepting our health, the relationships placed in our lives, and even the smallest mishaps and experiences that we encounter on a regular basis – for many of us, faith and challenges to faith affect us most when it comes to our most basic needs: our physical sustenance - the thing we get jobs for, start businesses for, and otherwise look for ways to sustain ourselves.
There’s just nothing like that existential anxiety that maybe next month I’ll go into foreclosure and have nowhere to live and nothing to feed my family. And it is precisely here where faith makes its quintessential appearance.
So how does faith work? How do we tap into it? What role is it meant to play and where might it be distorted to serve a purpose it was never meant to serve? Let's continue to explore this together.
And by the way -- if you know someone who would appreciate these posts, please forward on!
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