I fear great things.

I know that with God, great things can and will happen. It is exciting, but deep down I am scared of the pressures that come after. The higher you go, the harder you fall. There is a voice in me that says, don’t go there – it’s too much work. 

I contradict myself so much. 

I would say that for me, the hardest part of my Christian life is not the fires nor the storms, but the days that come after. I have faith to cross the Red Sea, but no faith to cross the desert. 

What an analogy. I would rather lie low – stumbling and failing – on my own in Egypt, than be victorious in the Lord in the Promised Land.

“What if I stumble? What if I fall? What if I lose my step and make fools of us all?”

“…all things have been created through him and for him.”
(Colossians 1:16b NIV)

My motive is not for myself, but to seek God and His will. As a steward, I need to know what pleases my Master. All from Him, all for Him. This prepares me spiritually to do the work ahead of me.

What has been my problem:
“If you don’t feel strong desires for the manifestation of the glory of God, it is not because you have drunk deeply and are satisfied. It is because you have nibbled so long at the table of the world. Your soul is stuffed with small things, and there is no room for the great.” – John Piper

I thank God that I still had the chance to start this year right.

Another interesting story by Akio Morita in his book, “Made in Japan”:

They were finally able to produce a magnetic tape recorder – a technological feat at the time. It weighed 35kilos, and they priced it at 170,000yen – by my estimates it’s probably equivalent to 3 million yen in today’s economy.

The problem, Morita-san said, “Everybody liked it, but nobody wanted to buy it.”

“I then realized that having unique technology and being able to make unique products are not enough to keep a business going. You have to sell the products, and to do that you have to show the potential buyer the real value of what you are selling.” [emphasis mine]

Morita-san’s “a-ha!” moment came when he passed by an antique store, and saw someone buy an old vase that was more expensive than their tape recorder. Surely his product was a better bargain than an old vase! But, coming from a family that values art (his grandparents were art collectors) – he realized “that the vase had perceived value to the collector of antiques, and that he had his own valid reasons for investing that much money in such an object.”

“At that moment, I knew that to sell our recorder we would have to identify the people and institutions that would be likely to recognize value in our product.”

Long story short, they found a market that desperately needed a way to record voices. And they sold 20 units “almost instantly.”

Inspiring!

What if we saw work as an opportunity to worship?