"I realized the only answer was prayer – not a pleading for relief, but deeply and humbly listening for God to lead the way."

Actually, the seeds for this healing began when I took class. At that time, I was running what I believed to be my own business, and after a fair number of very successful years, we were, at that time, struggling with a lean period we ultimately never recovered from. While I was praying about this daily, I was still caught up in the human sense that I was responsible for our successes and failures, and by the end of the great recession the lack of progress had become quite discouraging. Thank goodness for class – it kept me going!

Then about four years ago a very heretical business idea came to thought – "scale the business back to just yourself."  What, go backwards? Not grow? Yet the clarity of this thought and the situation at that time was such that I didn’t ask too many questions, I just did it. Interestingly, this went very smoothly – I was able to help all my employees find new work, leases were managed, computer systems reconfigured, key clients stayed, a new office was developed at home, etc. But while on paper things now worked much better, I still carried a sense of failure, that somehow I should have done better.

This all appeared to come to a head at the beginning of 2016 when it became clear it was right for me to retire. Throughout all those lean years I had acquired significant debt in my efforts to keep things going humanly. I thought we had adequately prepared for this, but as we looked deeper into retirement, it became clear that this debt would now have a much greater impact than anticipated – in fact, it would take every extra bit of our retirement income for quite a number of years. In essence, there would be no surplus for the nicer things we had hoped for in retiring. Even if we considered radical steps such as selling our home and completely downsizing, we couldn’t seem to solve this problem.

I realized the only answer was prayer – not a pleading for relief, but deeply and humbly listening for God to lead the way. Clearly, I had to let go of personal sense and discover "what we truly had in our house." (see II Kings 4:2)  The turning point came when I realized there is only One Cause and Creator – one innovator, one developer, one manager and owner, and also that I was allowing myself to be held captive by a very aggressive, false standard that says success in business determines much of who we are today. As I let go of this, the needed listening came gently and naturally. By the time Association day came, the fear was gone and I was aware of being directed to take a number of specific steps, which I did.

The results were remarkable – starting in March and continuing to this day, we have seen a substantial surplus appear and remain in our monthly finances. At the same time we have had no change in income, and until this debt was paid off, no significant change in expenses that would have caused this. In addition, we were led to take several other major steps we never would have considered, all of which have furthered stabilized our financial position and provided a much needed, rightful sense of security and abundance. It’s become quite clear to me that the "oil still pours" – that all needs will be met, even when the need appears to be quite substantial. Perhaps even more remarkable is how my understanding of business is now changing – from an uncertain, prideful human activity to daily listening and trying to be about "our Father’s" business.

To say we are very grateful for the tangible outcomes of this healing would be an understatement. The real blessing (to me) from healings is not so much the human change, but the concrete revealing of what is real and true of God’s kingdom here and now.