Spiritual Entrepreneurship:: Fulfilling Your God-Ordained Destiny

By Bill Harrison and Mary Harrison

Having enjoyed succesful careers in three different industries (manufacturing, construction and commercial real estate) I have learned my talents, skills, experience and God-given gifts can be applied in different ways in many diverse situations. All that was required was willingnes to go wherever God led me and to do whatever he asked me to do. In the process of doing I learned God had a plan for my life which was more challenging than my own plan, but also far more exciting and rewarding. My wife Mary’s experience has been similar to mine, as she was afforded opportunities to go places and do things which have gone far beyond what she expected for herself.
Based on our life experiences as a married couple with dual professional careers, my wife and I developed the concept we call spiritual entrepreneurship. The challengers we faced in fulfilling the requirements of two separate careers without neglecting our family obligations led us to the principles and practices of this concept.
Feel free to visit out website at
www.spiritual-entreprenuership.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Total Publishing
• Release date: Apr 23, 2018
• ISBN: 9781633020078

Bill Harrison

Bill Harrison worked as a professional bassist in Chicago for four decades. He performed with jazz luminaries Clark Terry, James Moody, Bunky Green, Max Roach, Woody Herman’s Thundering Herd, Dizzy Gillespie, and many others. His theatrical credits include Wicked, The Lion King, Always Patsy Cline, The Visit, Bounce, Turn of the Century, and Billy Elliot. Bill’s writing has been published in After Hours, Allium, Counseling Today, The Intermezzo, Performink, The Sandpiper, Sledgehammer, Under the Gum Tree, and elsewhere. He has a private psychotherapy practice in Chicago, where he lives with his poet/therapist wife, Nina Corwin, and a naughty Bengal named Jazzy.

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NOTES

PREFACE

This book is a distillation of over forty-five years of my wife’s and my experience in trying to determine God’s will for our lives and to fulfill the purpose he has for us, that is to say, our God ordained destiny. In this process we have discovered God’s plans for those who love and obey him go far beyond our mortal lives in this present universe. This realization has radically changed our outlook on life. Our voyage of discovery began in earnest in January 1970 when we separately, but simultaneously, made our first real commitment to Jesus Christ as Lord of our lives, as well as our Savior. Much of what we have learned since then has been by trial and error (the hard way) confirmed by Scripture only after the fact. This prolonged period of testing resulted from our lack of understanding of the Word of God, coupled with our desire to see his promises fulfilled in our lives RIGHT NOW.

In striving to do God’s will in our own strength, we have too often been deceived, discouraged and defeated by circumstances we had neither foreseen nor planned for. This was because we had not yet learned the simple truth Andy Stanley addresses in his book, Visioneering,

It is amazing what can be accomplished when we wait on God to lead us out. It is equally amazing the mess we can make of things when we charge out on our own. Our divine vision is not dependent on us making something happen. It is dependent on God making something happen. ¹

Now, Praise God! We are learning to abide and remain in Christ Jesus, to walk after the Spirit and not after the flesh and to leave the results to God. The results have been astounding. It is not that life has suddenly become a bed of roses – far from it. For we continue to experience both triumph and tragedy - victory and defeat. We have gone places and done things we never dreamed we could. We have had fulfilling careers and been repeatedly praised and promoted and we have been criticized, demoted, laid off and asked to resign. We have at times made more money than we ever thought possible, at other times seen our income suddenly cut in half – we were once forced to move out of a house we could no longer afford. We have been miraculously healed of one incurable disease, diagnosed with another, had a tumor disappear without treatment, had multiple surgeries and lost an eye to cancer. We have seen many miraculous answers to prayer and had times when we wondered where God was and whether he was listening to us. In short, we have experienced both the power of Christ’s resurrection, and the fellowship of his suffering. Through it all however, God has been there for us and has not allowed us to suffer more than we could bear. In every difficult situation in which we have found ourselves, he has provided comfort and support and eventually a way of escape.

We have learned no challenge is too big for God nor is any request too small to bother him with. He has never been presented with a problem he could not solve – in his own time and in his own way. We have learned God’s promises to us are always kept, but we must have the faith to believe he will do what he has said he will and the patience to wait for him to do it. We have learned the life he has planned for us is far better than anything we could ever imagine for ourselves, much less achieve on our own. As Andy Stanley says,

Your uniqueness and individuality will reach its pinnacle in the context of your pursuit of God’s plan for your life. ²

Now, as we said, we have learned much of this the hard way, by understanding God’s will only after having experienced failure in our attempts to serve and please him in our own knowledge and strength. While experience may be a good teacher, we feel experience will be more valuable if it results from an understanding of God’s will, rather than preceding it. We are convinced the majority of Christians in the world today are falling far short of the true potential of their lives because they either do not know God’s purpose for them, or they are afraid to take the risks involved in striving to achieve it. We were reluctant to venture far from our familiar surroundings when we first accepted the call to follow Jesus. Our first few halting steps were not made without doubt and fear. But each time we have made the attempt to follow what we perceived to be God’s leading, we have found God made provisions for all of our needs. He brought us safely through every circumstance we encountered (though often bearing scars). Eventually we realized everything works out for the best when we trust God completely and follow him everywhere he leads us, even when we don’t understand why he wants us to go there.

Ultimately we have discovered our purpose in life is to empower others to succeed by helping them to discover their own life purpose, and encouraging them to passionately pursue it until their purpose is fulfilled. This requires them to leave their comfort zone and engage in difficult and risky endeavors with no guarantees of success. In other words they must develop an entrepreneurial spirit. The ultimate key to success then is to do this with the guidance and empowerment of God’s Holy Spirit. Hence we call this process spiritual entrepreneurship.

Bill and Mary Harrison

Plano, Texas

PROLOGUE

This is a book about Spiritual Entrepreneurship – what it is and how you can become a spiritual entrepreneur. It is not full of theoretical dissertation about risk-taking and the process of entrepreneurship. Nor is it a simple program guaranteed to transform your life in ten easy steps. Such a program does not really exist. It is, I believe, a practical approach to learning how to free yourself from a state of dependence on and reaction to external agents and events beyond your control and understanding, and to proactively gain control over your present life and ultimate destiny. I do not, however, ask you to accept our word without challenge. Rather I ask you to be open-minded and receptive, as were the people of Berea to whom Paul and Silas preached. I ask that you do as they did and search the Scriptures to see for yourselves if these things are true. (Acts 17:10, 11)

If you do, I am confident you will discover for yourself how to draw on an unlimited source of wisdom, understanding, and power which will enable you to overcome your fears of change and the future - to comprehend the forces which are reshaping our world and to live in harmony and peace with God, man, and nature.

Having done this you will be able to say with the Preacher:

"To enjoy your work and to accept your lot in life - that is indeed a gift from God. The person who does that will not need to look back in sorrow on his past, for God gives him joy.

See the way God does things and fall into line. Don’t fight the facts of nature.

Enjoy prosperity whenever you can, and when hard times strike, realize that God gives you one as well as the other - so that everyone will realize that nothing is certain in life.

Tackle every task that comes along, and if you fear God you can expect his blessing.

If you wait for perfect conditions, you will never get anything done.

Keep on sowing your seed, for you never know which will grow - perhaps it all will.

It is a wonderful thing to be alive!" (Ecclesiastes 5:20; 7:13, 14, 18; 11:4, 6, 7 LB)

OUR STORY: PART ONE

This is the story of the life journeys of two people, Bill and Mary Harrison, and how they came to discover the principles of Spiritual Entrepreneurship. It illustrates how God took two people with very different backgrounds and temperaments, as well as skill sets and interests, and brought them together into a relationship which has proven to be mutually advantageous and which has allowed them both to utilize their gifts and talents to pursue their dreams and achieve fulfillment. And so it begins…

I, Bill, was not originally a risk taker by nature. I was raised in a three-generation household in Dallas, Texas, with my sister, our parents and our maternal grandparents. We had a warm and loving home environment, one in which I felt quite comfortable and secure. I was basically shy and reticent outside of my family and a small circle of close friends, and felt little need to travel far beyond the secure confines of my own little world. I was raised in the church, and made a profession of faith in Jesus Christ as my Savior at an early age.

Things began to change when I graduated from high school and enrolled at the University of Texas in Austin. Although this was a large campus with over 40,000 students in a city 200 miles from home, I was not nervous about leaving the nest and trying out my wings. Several of my high school friends were also enrolled there, so I felt comfortable and secure. At the University I quickly expanded my circle of friends by joining a social fraternity. I became increasingly more self-confident and gregarious in this environment, to the point that I was elected Chapter President of my fraternity. In the midst of all this activity I was steadily expanding my outlook on life, as well as my personal comfort zone, but was doing it without regard to what plans God might have for me.

My wife, Mary, on the other hand, grew up in a much different environment in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She was the middle of five children, with two older and two younger brothers. With four brothers and no sisters she grew up in an atmosphere of individualism and competition, rather than of comfort and security. Her parents strained relationship contributed to this. Her father was an amateur radio enthusiast and spent more time with his hobby than with his family. All of this tended to isolate them from one another and they never developed a strong sense of family.

In addition Mary endured a number of traumatic experiences beginning at an early age. Her two younger brothers had serious health issues and when she was only ten years old, her father contracted a life-threatening illness and was hospitalized for over nine months before recovering. After six months her father’s employer stopped paying his salary, creating a severe financial strain on the family in addition to the emotional toll. All of this strongly influenced Mary’s outlook on life and helped to foster an attitude of independence and self-reliance.

Mary saw a college education as a way to become self-sufficient. She knew her family could not afford to send her while her two older brothers were still in college, so she applied herself to making good grades and securing a college scholarship and student loans. Her efforts were rewarded and she was able to enroll at Austin College in Sherman, Texas.

Although we were raised in adjoining states and attended colleges some 260 miles apart, Mary and I met in an unusual, but fortuitous way. She was spending the summer of 1963 at a college roommate’s home in Dallas. We met in on a blind date arranged by mutual friends and had a few unremarkable dates before going our separate ways in the fall.

Then in early October I found myself at the last minute without a date for the Texas – Oklahoma football game and called up Mary in Sherman and invited her to go with me. She was surprised to hear from me again, but the opportunity to attend Texas-OU weekend was too great to pass up, so she accepted my invitation and the rest is history. It was as if we met for the first time that weekend and it was love at first sight. By the time the weekend was over, we were hopelessly in love with each other.

After eight or nine months of burning up the 260 miles of highway between Austin and Sherman on a regular basis, I took the biggest risk I had ever made in my young life by proposing marriage to Mary. She took an even bigger risk by accepting. And that was the beginning of our adventure together.

The next fall Mary transferred to the University of Texas, where she able to pursue a degree in business, an option that was not available at Austin College. We soon we decided to take our next risk – getting married in January, between the fall and spring semesters. We decided to do this despite the risks involved in getting married before we had completed our degrees. Although our parents told us we were on our own once we got married, we felt we could find a way to make things work and we were willing to take the risk.

Working part time minimum wage jobs while attending classes, however, we were having a hard time making ends meet. Mary took the next big risk, agreeing to drop out of school and work full time for the next year while I finished my degree. In return she would go back to school and finish her degree after I graduated and found a job. Beginning in the summer of 1965, she worked full-time as an administrative assistant/purchasing agent at the Plasma Dynamics Laboratory at UT’s School of Engineering. She enjoyed working in an academic environment and became comfortable associating with professors and doctoral students.

A year later I graduated with a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering. I received job offers from eight or nine major aerospace companies and could have taken a job anywhere in the country, but decided to stick with more familiar surroundings and accepted an engineering position with LTV Aerospace Corporation in Grand Prairie, Texas near my hometown of Dallas. As agreed, Mary enrolled at Arlington State University (now the University of Texas at Arlington) and received her BBA degree, with a major in Marketing, a year later. In the process she received the Wall Street Journal Student Achievement Award.

Unlike me, Mary was not raised in the church. Her parents did not attend and Mary questioned the value of church attendance. Then, while attending Arlington State University, Mary was befriended by a young woman with Campus Crusade who began to share with Mary her faith in Jesus Christ. After meeting once a week for about six months and a number of lengthy and probing discussions, Mary asked Christ to forgive her sins and become her Savior. God finally had her attention and he began to show her what he wanted her to do - beginning with associating with a local church.

Mary began working on getting me to attend church with her and we eventually joined a Methodist church near our apartment. I had little interest at first, as my career in my chosen profession was going well, with regular raises and promotions. I saw no need to do anything different. As I pursued the American dream of career, marriage and family, God was patiently waiting for the opportunity to share with me his plans for my life. I was too busy and distracted for God to get through directly to me, so while he waited on me he began to approach my wife.

Mary had never planned to go to graduate school. She had thought she would get her bachelor’s degree, work for a year or two to help save money for a down payment on a house, and then have children and settle into a life of homemaking and child rearing. However, when she began interviewing for jobs, she was met with indifference. In spite of her good grades and academic awards, the best offer she received required only one year of college work. She was very disappointed. Taking that job would mean her efforts in obtaining a college degree would be wasted.

The thought of pursuing further education began to resonate with her. After she and I talked and prayed about it, she decided to commute to Denton and pursue an MBA at North Texas State University (now The University of North Texas). Mary excelled once again in her studies and received an award as the Outstanding Graduate Marketing Student. Then, during her last year in the MBA program she was given an opportunity to teach undergraduate classes in marketing and discovered she enjoyed teaching at the college level.

Mary also had a strong desire for motherhood. We waited until her last semester in the MBA program to try to start a family and were thrilled when she soon became pregnant. Mary was thrilled with the prospect of becoming a mother, but we had another difficult decision to make. She found she really wanted both motherhood and a college teaching career, which she considered much more family-friendly than anything she could find in the business world. We began to prayerfully consider the possibility of her embracing both motherhood and an academic career. After much discussion and prayer we decided she should proceed in that direction.

In order to teach at the college level Mary would need a doctorate, so she applied for and was accepted into the Ph.D. program at North Texas State University. She started her doctoral program that summer and our daughter Jennifer Lynn was born that fall. Jennifer was an absolute delight; she was bright, inquisitive and into everything. After her birth Mary taught two undergraduate courses each semester, while taking two or three doctoral courses. Jennifer adapted well to her schedule, and enjoyed the few days a week she spent at the home of a friend and neighbor who had one child of her own while we were at work and school. Mary and I felt good about this arrangement and it continued to work well throughout the doctoral program.

Neither one of us realized it at the time, but God was beginning to show us the plans he had for our lives. These would involve leaving our comfort zone and engaging in risk taking on an even larger scale in order to fulfill the potential he saw in us and meet the expectations he had for us.

ONE: WHY TAKE THE RISKS?

Why should we take risks? Why can’t we just live a quiet, if unspectacular life? We can of course, but if we do we will miss out on much of what life has to offer. We will also fall short of fully exercising the capabilities God has endowed us with. In order to utilize all of the potential that God has placed within us we have to be willing to step out in faith and go wherever he leads us. Only then can we take advantage of the opportunities that are placed before us. As the saying goes, Opportunity knocks but once. When it does, we must seize it.

SEIZING THE DAY

Carpe diem! Seize the day!

With these words John Keating, the English teacher played by Robin Williams in the film Dead Poets Society, ¹ challenges his young students at Welton Academy.

Make your lives extraordinary.

Showing them the class photographs of boys who had attended the school sixty or seventy years before, he tells them:

They’re not that different than any of you, are they? Hope in their eyes, just like yours. They believe themselves destined for wonderful things, just like many of you. Well, where are those smiles now, boys? What of the hope?

Did most of them not wait until it was too late before making their lives into even one iota of what they were capable? In chasing the almighty deity of success, did they not squander their boyhood dreams? Most of those gentlemen are fertilizing daffodils now!

Don’t make the same mistake, he urges them. Dare to be different. March to your own drumbeat.

Carpe diem. Seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary.

Keating succeeds in instilling in his students a spirit of adventure and a willingness to risk standing out from the crowd. In the end, however, he pays a terrible price. One of his students, who desires to become an actor, is thwarted by a domineering father who insists he is going to be a doctor. Having failed to achieve his own dreams of practicing medicine, the father is determined to fulfill them vicariously through his son. The boy, his spirit crushed by the manner in which his father has taken his own future from him, commits suicide. Learning Mr. Keating has been encouraging his students to think for themselves, the school administration blames him for the boy’s death and dismisses him from his position on the faculty. Yet another victim sacrificed on the altar of conformity.

Although somewhat melodramatic, the movie does have a valid point to make. There is a price to be paid for asserting one’s individuality and daring to travel a different road than the well-worn track of the masses of humanity. The fact remains however, there have always been those who have felt the benefits of pursuing their dreams far outweighed the cost of being considered different. And it is only because of them that mankind has ever broken the bonds of the status quo and progressed to the next plateau.

As the poet Robert Frost wrote:

Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by. And that has made all the difference. ²

John Keating doesn’t really exist; he was a fictional character. It was, after all, only a movie. John Keating never really risked anything. However, there have been and are men and women who have dared to break away from the pack and to march to their own drumbeat. One such man was Henry David Thoreau, who was one of the free-spirited dead poets from which John Keating and his students drew so much inspiration.

MAKING OUR DREAMS A REALITY

Born in Concord, Massachusetts in the year 1817, Thoreau lived in an age when the vast majority of Americans still lived a pastoral existence and the Industrial Revolution was only just beginning to transform the way the country lived and worked. Looking back from our vantage point in the Twenty-first Century, we are tempted to think of Thoreau’s day as an idyllic period of American history, halcyon days preceding the carnage and devastation of the Civil War and the turmoil of our own times. Nevertheless, nearly two centuries ago, he was of the opinion: The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. ³ He felt most of his contemporaries were so consumed with making a living and amassing more possessions than their neighbors that they were missing out on the best parts of life. They seemed totally unaware of the beauty and joy in nature surrounding them, free for the taking, as they desperately and vainly sought after pleasure in the things which their money could buy. As the multitudes clamored for a sense of satisfaction which always seemed tantalizingly close; building bigger houses, wearing the latest fashions, driving new buggies, Thoreau’s heart was crying out:

Simplify, simplify. Instead of three meals a day, he said, if it be necessary eat but one... Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. The nation ... lives too fast. {It is} cluttered with furniture and tripped up by its own traps, ruined by luxury and heedless expense, by want of calculation and a worthy aim, as the million households in the land; and the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose. ⁴

In 1845 Thoreau set out to prove his point (at least to himself). He built a small cabin on the shores of Walden Pond a short distance from the village of Concord. There he lived alone for two years, tending a small garden of beans, potatoes, peas, and turnips, and foraging in the woods for nuts, berries and other such provender as Nature provided. He did not use tea, nor coffee, nor butter, nor milk, nor fresh meat …and so did not have to work to get them... ⁵ Instead he spent his time reading, or sitting quietly in the door of his cabin, listening to the birds singing and the squirrels chattering in the nearby trees, the bullfrogs croaking by the pond, the distant baying of dogs or lowing of cows, and sometimes the far away rumbling of wagons over bridges, mournful train whistles or the faint, sweet melody of church bells.

He explored the surrounding countryside - the fields, meadows, hills, and woodlands - taking special delight in the changing nature of Walden Pond as season followed season in regular progression. He acquainted himself with the native flora and fauna, carefully noting the rich variety of life which surrounded him on all sides. In short, he made the most of each day, whether working or simply relaxing, in every event rejoicing in the simple pleasures of life. He described his adventures in a book, simply entitled Walden, which was published in 1854. In it he says:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deeply and suck out all the marrow of life... ⁶

Was he successful? Did he, by going back to the bare essentials truly learn what life had to teach? Did he live more deeply than he otherwise would have?

In conclusion he wrote:

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. ⁷

LEARNING HOW TO LIVE

Putting foundations under our dreams, anchoring them firmly in reality, seeing them take shape in the real world and transforming them into something tangible is the heart’s desire of humanity. Who of us that has taken the time to stop and think about the meaning of our life has not wished we could achieve greater success, have more of an impact on the world around us, and find a larger measure of fulfillment than we have thus far found. Alas! For too many of us it remains mere wishful thinking, for we are not willing to invest the time and effort required to flesh out our daydreams and turn them into reality. What Thoreau perceived in his day - an era which seems serene and tranquil to us in our present hurried, harried existence - is certainly true today. Most of us are too busy trying to make it through the day to give much thought to what we are doing or why we are doing it. The daily grind of earning a living consumes all of our time and energy. But, as Thoreau discovered, that is simply not enough. We can never be satisfied with just making a living - no matter how grand a life we can afford. We must have a larger view of life, one which encompasses the rest of the world and establishes our place in it and our reason for existence.

A 20th Century philosopher named Harold Kushner, in his book When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, says it this way:

"Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Those rewards create almost as many problems as they solve. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.⁸

The need for meaning is not a biological need like the need for food and air. Neither is it a psychological need, like the need for acceptance and self-esteem. It is a religious need, an ultimate thirst of our souls." ⁹

In order to find that meaning we must be willing to look beyond ourselves, beyond our own immediate wants and desires, outward toward the people around us. As Kushner says:

"A life without people, without the same people day