Giving Honor and Holding Shields

Its overdue- the time to say thanks. I like to say thanks. I like to honor those that I owe so much to; it feels good and its important. I feel like I've done something bigger than myself when I honor someone. On this blog you've seen a couple of examples of some honors I have given special people in my life- and I hope in my life I am able to spread more honor...

But right now its time to honor God. I really have a million reasons to honor God but I am going to focus on one. I just read my blog title from December 9th and was freshly reminded what a dark and challenging valley my sales teams, my family, and I just walked through. It was a very difficult sales quarter to say the least. I won't outline the specifics but suffice it to say I was worried for some very real reasons.

During this bleak sales time I knew I had to achieve a critical balancing act of relaying a confident message to corporate while building up the hope, self-belief, and focus of the sales reps. I had to accomplish this with little to no help from our situation. In fact the external evidence of our situation pointed to a possible "worst quarter ever" scenario. Balancing these heavy loads is more difficult when you are trying to maintain belief yourself. Sometimes it feels plastic and hollow to tell people to "keep going", "keep believing", "keep trying", "stay with it", and "keep believing in us", when all you have to give them are your words.

...That is except when you are in business with God. I learned a lot last quarter (sales quarter ending 12/31/09) about the God who "calls those things which are not as though they were". I kept up my morning devotional routine and kept God in the forefront and the first position in both my day and my life. Yet, my circumstances nearly suffocated me as I was giving everything I had and nothing was happening to improve our sales. I have limits, I've hit them before, and I pretty much hit a mental and emotional wall last quarter but the Lord each day would give me some verse or some thought that would inspire me.

In order to help the team's confidence and morale I would go over and have a 5-7 minute chat with them each morning. As I stayed with that each day I began to suspect the Lord was in some of the encouraging things I was relaying to them. After several days of it I was actually asking the Lord what the word of the day was for us. Each day I would have a story, a word, a phrase, a kudos, or something to say to them. There was one day I felt like the Lord was with me so strongly that as I relayed an inspiring message to the team my own eyes welled up- the Lord was with us. It was a hard way to learn the lesson but THIS my friends is working with God. It just about broke me down going through the quarter but I learned that God was with us, he was with me, and he could be trusted. It did not mean that we could sit around and sing a hymn and expect our sales to come in- it meant working harder and smarter than anybody and praying like crazy that God would do something. It meant me as a manager coming to work and opening my mouth to say something KNOWING God would give me something important and encouraging for my team- and myself.

One day I remember talking to the guys about conducting ourselves in the battle in a manner we would be proud of at the end- no matter the outcome. I said, "I will work hard, stay positive, stay supportive of you guys, and at the end of this I will not be ashamed of how I conducted myself in the midst of this battle." This ended up being true. By the Lord giving me the confidence in those meetings each day to encourage them with some word from him- no matter how bleak it felt during the sales day or at night I stayed behind the guys all the way. I was enabled to do this by the help of the Holy Spirit and by staying in his Word and allowing him to speak to me.

I was blessed one day because one of the guys told me in front of the group that my talk from the previous day really spoke to him and he thought about it alot that night; that was cool.

So, I want to praise God and give him the honor because he stayed with me all the way through that bleak and difficult quarter, he inspired me, he helped me to inspire the sales reps, he taught me a lot about going to battle with him, and much more. You notice I didn't tell you how the quarter ended up? Why? It doesn't matter because as (again) I told the guys one morning, "I think the outcome of us staying strong, staying together, supporting each other, working hard, and never giving up will have a positive influence on our character and our careers- no matter how this short-term measurement of the quarter turns out." I truly believed that- and I still do.

But OK.. I will tell you God did give us an external victory as well- in true God style.. In the last 8 business days of the quarter we pulled out a landslide victory. We wound up having the second highest number of deals in recent company history and we beat the previous year for the same quarter with less reps! So all praise to God for such a dramatic finish- and for the lessons we all learned.

A lot of people talk about the Biblical Letter to the Ephesians detailing the "armor of God". One of the key pieces of the armor listed there is the "shield of faith". I used to wonder about the shield of faith and just say "oh that means trust God". I certainly learned that lesson more richly this quarter. At points this quarter I had no more words, no more arguments, no more ideas, and no one could tell me anything that could help. I felt totally by myself. At that time I learned about this shield of faith in God- and how to use it, how to actually apply this passage in the Bible. I found out the way this shield works is .. you hang on and never let go.