Daily Devotions

To the woman he said, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” And to the man he said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:16-21

I met my father when I was 15 years old. At that time he had a great job as the manager of the service department of a tractor and implement dealership. Three years later, the dealership was sold to new owners and my dad was out of a job.

I have no idea how he did it, or where he got the money to do it, but he rented a building, hired some mechanics and a parts person, and opened his own diesel repair business. I worked for him one summer. It was hard. Business was good but it was complicated. I remember the race to be the first one to the bank so the payroll check didn’t bounce. I remember when he tried to get a small business loan so provide a cushion but it didn’t happen. A year later he had to shut the doors.

“In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life…”

A year after that, he tried again. He tried his hand at selling trucks. He would buy older trucks, rebuild their engines, fix them up and sell them. He hired a couple more employees – more families that he felt personally responsible for every single day that business was open. And once again, although he was a mechanical genius and a fantastic salesman, he wasn’t very adept at book-keeping and the details of running a business and that one closed too.

“By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground…”

Times are tough these days. All week long we have thought about those who have lost jobs. Today our attention turns to the other side of that relationship. The people who have the guts and the know how to open a business of their own, to create jobs for others, and to add their skills to the fabric of life. Imagine their daily realities, constantly shifting markets, unseen overseas competitors that can undercut prices while still making their own healthy profits, governmental rules to follow, tax policies that often seem anti-business, insurance rates rising faster than a speeding bullet.

Imagine what they worry about when they are trying to fall asleep! The families who make their daily bread in their employ. Maybe the generations before them who kept the family business going through good times and bad and now it is their turn to shoulder the burden.

99.7% of all the businesses in the US today are small firms employing fewer than 500 workers. They pay 44% of the private payroll. They generated 64% of the new jobs over the past 15 years. And every year, about 10% of small firms open for business and about 10% of them close their doors.

None of this is easy. But imagine how it is when it works. Imagine what it would be like to go to sleep at night, knowing that you had just had a good day. Knowing that the idea you once had has now turned into a lucrative business, providing for the needs of your workers, adding value to the lives of your customers, allowing you to earn your own daily bread.

Whether you believe it or not, I trust that the God who made provision for the characters in the creation stories continues to make provision for us. It is the Holy Spirit who inspires those ideas, who gifts those with the capacity to start new businesses, and it is God who hears their prayers of gratitude, and sometimes their prayers of worry and anxiety, before they go to sleep each night.

Let us pray: Dear Lord, thank you for those men and women who take risks and follow their hearts in starting new businesses and offering employment to those who join them in their ventures. We pray that you continue to lift up those people, continue to open doors, continue to make provision for us all. In Jesus’ name. Amen.

This entry was posted on October 16, 2009 at 2:05 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.