How God improved my love of my work, and increased the amount of work I received, DURING the Coronavirus.

There's often a mistaken belief that God and business don't mix. But once you put your faith in God, He guides ALL areas your life - and that includes your work. 

Even if you find your faith later in life, when you look back over your "non believing" years, you can see how God worked in the background, preparing you for when you did finally believe in Him. I am the perfect example of this.

Background

If you read my ATHEIST TO FOLLOWING GOD post, you'll know that I only found my faith in June 2020, however, I had been running my own business since 1996. 

Back in 1994 my father died, and he left me just enough money to buy a computer, printer, and word processing software. This I used to set up a part time typing businesses, while I continued to work in factories to earn money. 

In September 1996 I started working for myself full time, and over the following years I built up a good reputation with many different clients, both individuals and businesses, including researchers in academia, who needed copy typing, or recorded interviews and focus groups transcribed for their research.

However, over time I got bored, and by 2007 I was looking for something to do, as I was fed up of just typing day in, day out - even though I had my wife, and one member of staff working with me.

One of my clients asked if I could look after his phone calls while he was on holiday. Unfortunately, I didn't have the necessary set up (this was before VOIP/Internet based phones were a big thing), but it got me thinking about doing call answering. I looked into it and eventually decided to start a service. However, I still kept the typing going.

Between 2008 and 2012 the call answering service was successful, with three members of my staff (my wife and two others), but again I was bored, and I had actually started to hate the business. Once one of my valued staff members decided to leave, I chatted with my wife and we decided to shut the business, (we made it clear to the remaining member of staff that she still had a job, if she wanted it, in whatever we did next). I sold the business to a competitor and went back doing the typing. The alternative would have been to invest a lot of money, a bigger property, more staff and better software to continue the call answering. It would be a huge amount of debt, and neither my wife nor myself wanted to take that on.

I tried to launch a few other small businesses but nothing really worked, and so I was back to the typing.

By 2015, again I was bored with typing. I also had very long periods with little or no work coming in. I had met a lady who ran an office supplies business, and we got chatting and I ended up doing sales for her. Then a few months later she said she had decided to she was going to close the business if she couldn't find a buyer. I thought this would be an excellent alternative to typing, and my wife agreed. So, I raised the money the lady wanted and bought the business. BIG MISTAKE!

Despite a few early successes, I quickly learned I was no salesman - in fact I hated having to cold call potential customers, even more than I hated the typing. While the purchase of the business had included the current customer base, I struggled to get new ones on board. I kept borrowing money to keep the business afloat but by 2017, I had to admit defeat and sadly closed the business, still owing a lot of money. (It wasn't worth anything to be able to sell it.)

So, from 2017 onwards I was back to typing again. I had lost a lot of contracts during the preceding two years because I had concentrated almost exclusively on the office supplies business. So, I had to rebuild my reputation.

Fast forward to 2020

The typing service had picked up again, but it wasn't doing marvellously, and of course, when the Coronavirus hit, meaning most businesses and organisations were shut down, even the few contracts I had on obviously became a trickle. 

But then in June I found God - or He found me (see my "...Following God" post, linked to above for the details on how that happened). And from that point everything seemed to change.

I know God isn't a fruit machine, or a wish machine, you can't just ask Him for anything and He'll give it to you. But it was remarkable how much things changed with work.

In September 2020 I had read about tithing, and about how God asked for 10% of what someone earns, and He will repay you more in return. A particular passage in the Bible stood out, Malachi 3:10: "Bring all the tithes into the storehouse so there will be enough food in my Temple. If you do," says the LORD of Heaven’s Armies, "I will open the windows of heaven for you. I will pour out a blessing so great you won’t have enough room to take it in! Try it! Put me to the test!"

I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and I had also listened to a video by Dr Charles Stanley, a well known American Pastor and founder of In Touch Ministries. This video is called "A Financial Plan" and you can watch it on YouTube. This video also gave a positive testimonial about tithing. 

So, with God saying to me "Try it! Put me to the test!" I thought, fair enough, I will. I didn't have a lot of money in the bank, but I took out 10% and that Sunday at Church I put the money in the collection bowl. I said to God "I am giving this money willing, Lord, but you know my financial situation, so this is also the test you told me to put you to."

The next day - less than 24 hours later - I received an email from a client I hadn't heard from in nearly a year. They used to hire me very regular client, that had suddenly gone quiet, and that was before the Coronavirus was even known about. In spite of two emails to my contact there, I hadn't heard a thing from them. But the email said they had a job on, and asked if I could help them with it. The total of this job was SEVEN TIMES what I had tithed on the Sunday.

But this wasn't all. The Tuesday - so just 48 hours after tithing - I got an email from another client. Earlier in the year, they asked me for a quote for a number of recordings. That had been for a budget application, and he had said he would come back to me if he had been successful and granted the funding for his research. The email was to tell me that he had been successful, but the research had grown and the number of recordings would be significantly higher than he first asked me to quote for. In fact that contract lasted from early September 2020 to the middle of March 2021, and the overall total of turned out to be TWELVE TIMES what I had "tithed" the day before.

So, in two days from tithing, I had two jobs come in with a total of over nineteen times the amount I had given to the Church.

Now remember, this was September 2020. Few businesses were operating as normal, if at all, because of lockdowns and people being advised to work from home. And yet, seemingly out of the blue I get two contracts, one that would last me six months, working almost flat out five days a week. 

And even after that contract finished, it felt like God gave me two weeks off, and since Easter, I have had two more contracts come in which have been keeping me very busy.

Turning hate to love

You can read lots of times in the Bible about how God, and Jesus, turned one person's hate into love for their fellow man; but what about their businesses? 

Here's the thing. Now I realise, as I look back over the years, despite my attempts to get away from typing, and despite the slow times when I then tried something else, typing has remained there. Even when I pretty much stopped the service while running the office supplies business, I came back to typing. 

It feels like God was preparing me in the past, ensuring my future - even though for the vast majority of those years I was an atheist. The Bible teaches us that God knows us before we are born, and knows our futures. He prepares the path, but it is down to us whether we follow it. 

Now, I LOVE the typing, because I know it's God's will for me. He constantly ensures there's work for me and it allows me time to do things for God, through the duties I carry out at my church, which I wouldn't necessarily be able to do, if I was employed, or had another type of business.

So, now, even when the recording is poor quality, or I can't hear one of the participant's clearly, and the job feels a slog, I still love it, because it has been blessed by God.

The moral of this is, if you are in a job you hate, or you are struggling in your business, make time to speak to God about it. Lay it all before Him. It may be a small thing needs to change, or possibly it is not God's will for you to be doing the job you have been. If you get a signal from God about your business, the best advice I can give is to listen and follow that advice.