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What To Do First to Make a Profit

The PF Women Team at our Annual Team Retreat  ~ 2018 Today on Seth Godin's blog, he said: It's tempting to decide to make a profit first, then invest in training, people, facilities, promotion, customer service and most of all, doing important work. In general, though, it goes the other way. Yes, it does. If you are waiting to make a profit before you do these things, in my experience you're  not going to make a profit. So many organizations, ministries and churches are struggling with financial issues. I know your pain. As anyone who follows our story knows, our ministry was in a ton of debt four years ago when I came on as director.  Since that time, we've gotten out of debt and turned a profit every year.  God has done amazing things through out team, for which we give Him the glory! I find that what Seth is saying here is absolutely true, with one disclaimer. For Christian leaders, spiritual disciplines must always be first. Before we started i...

Let's not get ridiculous

I'm seeing this more and more.

Christian authors, speakers, musicians and many others are Facebooking and Tweeting constantly, and I love that. As we receive tidbits of information from them all day long, sometimes it's profound and other times not so much. We might hear a powerful quote from their latest message, or we might find that they really like McDonald's shamrock shakes. 

So at times these Christian celebrities, for lack of a better phrase, come out with a status or tweet something like this:

"God has you in mind..."

So later on whether it be five minutes later or five days later somebody writes on their Facebook wall or their Twitter, "God has you in mind..." and someone else pipes up and says, "that's a Beth Moore quote, by the way."

Really.

I love Beth Moore. And Joyce Meyer. And Christine Caine and many of the other amazing people of God that are quoted. I just randomly chose Beth in my illustration, but here is my point. Beth Moore wasn't the first one to say, "God has you in mind."  I'm pretty sure Psalm 139 takes care of that.

Some people take a lot of common thoughts like, "Be kind to someone" or "Let God have His way in every day" or "Talk less and listen more today" or "Make a world of difference wherever you are..." and instead of just accepting that these things are general wisdom from God's Word for the population they start attributing basic sentences to these folks since they are on their devotional thoughts for the day or their social media pages.

Next we're going to hear that the letter of the day is "G" and it comes to us courtesy of Billy Graham. Sorta like Sesame Street, only for Christians.

I preached a message at Celebration one day about revival and at the end a lady ran up and said, "that was a Ravenhill message! Did you copy it and re-preach it?" I said, "No actually it's the Bible's message and although I'm quite familiar with Ravenhill I'm not exactly sure which message you speak of. I got this from reading my Bible and through my time with God in prayer. There's only so many ways you can "spin" revival...so if Ravenhill and I sounded even vaguely in sync in that message, maybe that's why. 

Not that I'm comparing myself to Leonard Ravenhill... [sigh]  Any of you with half a whit of sense know exactly what I mean by this and don't need an explanation.


Being a writer whose art is really important to me I know that sensible not to mention integral people know that it's important that we not plagiarize. It's important to give credit where credit is due. But really folks, I can't take credit for "God has you in mind" and I'm pretty sure none of the Christian celebrities expect to be permanently tagged either.

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