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| “Unfinished Business…with God” – Daniel Diaddigo |
I just got Daniel Diaddigo’s email newsletter and I think you should, too. If you’re too lazy to click here, I’ve posted his latest – spot-on, might I add – edition below as a guest post, with permission. He’s planning to do some great things with the newsletter, so here’s your second chance to “click here” and subscribe.
Daniel is also the author of a very important book called “Unfinished Business with God”. He’s on point with that piece, too. Click here to take a closer look at this poignant book, or to order or share it with someone who takes your opinion seriously that has unfinished business with God.
-AP
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| Daniel Diaddigo is a husband, father, author, and thought leader in marketplace ministry. |
“If you’ve got a business… you didn’t build that, someone else made that happen.”
These words, arranged and dispersed by President Barak Obama and broadcast ad nauseam by talk radio, have become the epicenter of late for a national discussion around the role people play in achieving success.
Pundits on the political right, with whom I would normally agree, have seized upon the President’s comments as proof positive of his collectivist soul.
They would argue that the American Dream resides not upon dependence upon government but dependence upon self, that rugged individualism made this country great, and that achievement is the net result of a person’s hard work and ingenuity.
And they would be wrong.
Don’t hit delete yet. Hear me out. I’m writing from the vantage of an entrepreneur.
If you count the Jolly Rancher racket I ran in middle school, I have owned, managed and/or created about a dozen companies over the past thirty years.
I know what it is to navigate regulations, litigation, and innovation. Leadership development, employee benefits and incentives, marketing campaigns, personnel issues, price points and competition occupy my daily discourse. I am familiar with eighteen-hour days and “vacations” stalked by market volatility.
Simply put, I understand experientially what people mean when they say they “built this business”. I, too, would like to believe that I am responsible for my own success.
But I am not. Someone else made that happen.
If we could hear past the static of American discourse and think biblically for a moment, I believe we would agree that we are not owners and we are not creators.
We are stewards.
Our gifts and talents, relationships, upbringing and proximity to opportunity are ordained by God. It is true that we reap what we sow and there does exist a causal relationship between our achievement and our diligence. But even the spark that drives us to achieve does not self-ignite. No, someone else made that happen as well.
That someone is God.
We are shepherds of that which the Lord entrusts to us. To the extent we follow Him, we lead well. To the degree we trust Him, we manage well. And where we depend on Him, we decision well.
But when we yield to the belief that that business is our own – we substitute ourselves for God as the center of all things.
I’m not making a political statement here. Our friends on the left are equally wrong, for they would insert government in that same space.
Here is truth: anything that occupies the center of our hope that is not Jesus is a distraction and a lie.
We who believe we are the reason for our business should remember He Who provides the breath with which we boast.