LESSON 5 :: The Love

Living the visionary life of the spiritreneur and embracing the change the occurs in the fourth phase of the business cycle.

• The Spiritreneur’s Flight You stretch out your wings and feel the sun on your back. You are grateful, alive, and comforted by the knowledge that this is where you were meant to be, doing what you are doing. This flight is a reflection of God, and you who were created in God’s image. You are loved, challenged, and desired; you are working in flight, in delight, in power.

Stay Fascinated

After having gone through The Launch, The Lurch, and The Lessons, you may be ready for some peace, some rest, and some deep down soul satisfaction. Good news! That’s what the spiritreneur finds in The Love. What does it feel like? What are some of the signs? This segment will help us identify those landmarks and look ahead to the future.

In this phase of the business cycle, there is a peace that allows you to turn your attention from the dragons and the gnats. Because you are more aligned with God, and you yourself are being changed, you will experience a fascination consisting of processes and dynamics that once may have been scary or disruptive.

You discover you want to learn how things work. You are like a reporter covering a once-in-a-lifetime story. The people around you, the places you go, and the dreams you continue to dream all hold wonder as you connect more with this marvelous world.

Smelling the Roses

In this new time of fascination, your senses are enlivened as you become more aware of the beauty around you. Being more aligned with God through your work frees you to be more attuned to the wonders of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell. Because your work is no longer separated from your soul, you know the beauty in everything you do. Because you know who is ultimately in charge of your work and your success, you are able to turn your attention away from micromanaging everything around you, to simply enjoying the wonder of other people and created things.

You will know you are in The Love phase when you enjoy your senses, invite others into the wonder, and feel gratitude for the beautiful and fascinating bounty around you.

• Getting Enough Sleep? A Gallup survey reported 46 percent of people who have sleep deprivation say it’s related to job stress. A quarter of those respondents said you can’t have career success unless you are sleep deprived. Even though eight hours sleep per night is the recommended minimum per adult, Fast Company magazine reported 33 percent of adults sleep less than six-and-a-half hours per night. And 45 percent of adults will sleep less to accomplish more.

Sleep

The issue of sleep is related to the issue of fascination.

When you are in this business stage, sleep comes more easily because you are serving the right God. We cannot rest when we serve other gods. Other gods do not allow us to sleep. When we are sleep deprived, we must ask ourselves the questions, “What god am I trying to make happy?” Success? — It never sleeps. Fame? — It cannot rest.

Moving with your business into The Love means you make time in your day for eating right and enjoying what you eat. You exercise and are delighted by your remarkable body. You kiss your kids and hug your spouse for more than the perfunctory 10 seconds.

No longer enslaved by the nagging grouches of, “I hate what I do,” or “I find no meaning in what I do,” or even the instability of the first three phases, we realize that our work and our play flow easily into one another, that we enjoy all that we do with every moment of our day.

Many times, the Book of Proverbs talks about wisdom bringing us peaceful sleep. The spiritreneur is infinitely wise in having opened his or her life to the consistent, all-encompassing and all-loving direction of God. Peaceful sleep, indeed.

• A Learning Environment “Spiritreneurs create, cultivate, and thrive in an atmosphere where learning, experimentation, excitement, and rapid forgiveness for mistakes are the norm, not the exception. It is a challenge and an invaluable discipline to determine that you are going to have a learning organization, rather than a perfect one. We must allow room for the children among us — often disguised as adults — to grow and learn. And we must make room for growth within ourselves.” — Jesus, Inc., p. 223

Experience Transformation

Near the end of his life on earth, Jesus visited a high mountain with some of his closest friends. While they were there, Jesus was transfigured. His face shone like the sun and his clothes became a dazzling white. As this was happening, two great prophets from the past appeared and spoke with Jesus.

I believe Jesus experienced transfiguration at that moment because he was doing what he loved doing. He was talking to people he had long studied, and he was in the presence of coworkers he loved.

Do What You Love

When you are doing what you most love, in the presence of the people who love and believe in you, you too can experience an incredible lightness of being. I call this the daily divine connection.

You know this is happening in your work life when people comment that you were born to do what you do. Others may comment on the peacefulness in your eyes. You may notice that situations and people that formerly made you upset or angry no longer have that power over you. You realize a warmth and inner glow when you are sitting in a meeting knowing that there is nowhere else you would rather be at that point in time. You feel a powerful contentment when you finish a task that has taken heart and soul — and yet left you refreshed and ready for more.

You find the presence of God in the eyes of your coworkers. You realize the presence of God when you see the world around you transformed because of your work. You understand the presence of God as you live in the present moment and know that it is simply of gift of grace to have found your call and to be enabled to live it so fully.

• The Bottom LineSpiritreneurs do not set out to harness God in order to make more money. Rather, spiritreneurs allow God to harness them and, in so doing, experience glory. To this point, this course has ultimately been about the process of surrender — the joy, the terror, the chaos, and the calm that comes from stepping into the unknown and allowing God’s breath to breathe through you.

Say Dayenu

Perhaps the most startling mark of a spiritreneur is one that makes us so distinct from the rest of the business world. When we are living in The Love, we know when to exhale and say, “Enough.”

Dayenu is a Hebrew word that means “it is enough” or “that would have been enough.” It is vital to spiritreneurs to tame the restlessness and drive that can disturb our true balance.

Three very distinct areas deserve our attention in this respect:

• Perfectionism. Spiritreneurs need to know when to keep polishing the silver and when to stop because the rest of the house is falling down around them! Jesus was not perfect in the sense that he pleased everyone all the time. He refused to follow the letter of the law, preferring the Hebrew translation of the word perfect as “compassionate” rather than “exact.” Saying dayenu means when to break free from the details when the details are keeping us from the higher good.
• Accumulation. True spiritreneurs experience “enough” when they understand that the “first fruits” belong to God. If we continue to accumulate and amass earnings, awards, or accolades without realizing that we will actually be more rich by giving abundantly, we will experience a internal shriveling that is attributed to fear of loss. Recognize when you have enough — enough staff, enough space, enough cash flow, and enough talent — and release all that you have to acknowledge and remember your source.
• Engineering. Many business people need to join the Leave It Alone Club. There are people to lift up and people to leave alone. There are deals to pursue and those to liberate. There are relationships to nurture and those best left unexplored. Our time, our energy, and our reputations are precious. Know when to say dayenu in the ways you spend your time organizing and planning your business. Listen to that inner voice when it tells you to “leave it alone.”

How much is enough? When we can’t or won’t answer this question, it will cause great discontent. Dayenu is not about limits — it is about fullness. It is about recognizing and counting the blessings we have right here, in this moment. Take a deep breath in, hold it for a couple seconds, then exhale. Ahhhh. To truly be able to say dayenu — that is wealth.

What’s Next?

Wow, you made it! You now are aware of the four phases of the spiritreneur’s business cycle. As I said in the introduction, it may take months for you to fully experience the entire process, or you may feel yourself going through them all in the same day. It is a recurring cycle throughout a spiritreneur’s life, but the wisdom of you taking this course is that you are now much better prepared to stay aligned in doing what you love for a living and honoring God in the work you do.

Now that you have this strong, solid base, you can work on the three skills that will catapult you forward into even more authentic growth, community-enhancing good, and your own remarkable sense of abundant life. These three skills are all evidenced in the life of Jesus and will be covered in our next three lessons. They are the Strength of Self-Mastery, the Strength of Action, and the Strength of Relationships.

Assignment: The Love

Read Section Four of Jesus, Inc. As you read, think about the following:

1. How could staying fascinated benefit you in your career? In your marriage? In your family life?
2. What is your attitude toward sleep? Do you crave it or resent it?
3. Have you ever experienced a form of transfiguration in your work, in your life? When was it? Who was with you? What were you doing? Describe the feeling and memory in detail.

When was the last time you had a dayenu moment? Describe it in detail. Remember and share the feeling.