You've got to start some where!

For those of you who know me, it is no secret that I have dreamed of starting a business that inspired others to dream big and to encourage them to follow those dreams. Well, it’s hard to inspire others to do something you are too afraid to do yourself. If someone had told me years ago that I was afraid of success, I would have laughed. After the last year of healing and soul searching, I see now I was most definitely fearful of so many things.

I have started chasing my dreams so many times. Things would start well and then something would happen and I would use that as my excuse to say, “the timing just isn’t right”. You see I believe God gave me a vision many years ago. It was a BIG vision. One where I would be creating beautiful things and sharing my story with others while teaching them how to also create beautiful things. The truth is this dream is big and its scary because this dream would require me to be vulnerable and to share parts of me that I honestly hoped would stay hidden.

This morning I prayed to God asking specifically for sales, lots of sales, big sales, successful sales. I’m a single mother and I make my living off commission. With the current state of our economy, sales are down and so is my income. Honestly, I cringe writing this because I never ask God for things like this. It’s always felt like a wasted prayer. How can I pray for God to give me sales or more money when there are much deeper, darker problems in the world?

Recently I have found myself in a place of wanting to go after this dream for no reason other than to obey God. I know without a doubt he’s called me to do this and I just want to obey him. I want to give my gifts and talents to him so that he may use them. Today, a little after lunch, God told me, “You’ve got to start somewhere!”. I remember someone telling me that they prayed to God asking to win the lottery and God said, “you’ve got to play”. You can’t win the lottery if you don’t play.

How can God bless something I haven’t even started?

James 4:2 says, “you have not because you ask not”, if you read further it says, “when you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives”. Psalm 37:4 says, “delight yourself in the Lord and he will give you the desires of your heart”. I think we often get confused by these verses. We think God will give us riches or fame, maybe good looks and big houses, but what I think we miss is that we have to align ourselves with God, setting our heart on him, checking our motives accordingly. That is when the desires of our hearts will align with his. He will give you the desires of your heart. This blew my mind!

Tonight, I came home. Logged into my website and started writing this post. I thought, “I’ve got to start somewhere”. I haven’t had a sell on my site in over a year and not one clicks in months. But I haven’t posted it anywhere. I haven’t shared it or even updated my site, so I didn’t expect anything different. To my surprise when I logged in there was 1 person live on my site. I thought that was kind of weird, but I brushed it off thinking, it must be tracking me. Then… I MADE A SALE! Literally I got a notification that a stranger, several states away placed an order. This may not seem like a big deal to anyone else, but I KNOW this was God’s way of say “JUST DO IT ALREADY”.

So here is to a new beginning and I can’t wait to see what God does!