Could I Ask God for a Business Idea? Origin Story, Part 4

Go here to read Part 3: More Prayer This Month Than Last Month.

In February 2019, my company sent me to a marketing conference, and one of the speakers said she had asked the Lord for a million-dollar (or a billion-dollar?) business idea.

This wasn’t a Christian conference, but she had a testimony of praying for a business idea and the Lord gave her one in a dream.

I had never been the entrepreneurial one in my family. My mom not only created a successful business, but continues to come up with business ideas all the time. Could this community recycle bags into bricks? Could she create an object to soothe upset stomachs?

My husband, too, has started several businesses. We were once driving through another country and he said, “You know what this area really needs? A concrete batch plant.”

That would never have crossed my mind.

Since I had never had a business idea in my life, coming out of that conference, I was curious. I said, Lord, I really like my job. I review children’s books for a living, I write programs, I read books—it’s all very fun. It’s like being an ice cream taster as a career—could I have a more fun job? I’m not at all in need of a new one. But could you send me a business idea? I have no idea if you could make my mind work like that, but maybe you could, and that could be fun.

The Lord has such a good sense of humor. For the next several weeks, he sent me at least one, and sometimes two or three, business ideas every day. Often they were truly heinous. (Ha! No, I’m not going to open a marketing agency. But that’s hilarious.)

Some of them weren’t really business ideas at all, but more like desires of my heart. (Write a book about Nehemiah.)

I captured all of these ideas.

At the time, I was finishing a course of study, and as I drove to the post office to mail in my final exam from the two year program, a thought came: “Start a prayer challenge.”

A three-week series of emails on the topic of prayer? I would love that! As a homeschool mom of young children, I knew how difficult it was to find time to pray long prayers.

I thought of it as an onramp to prayer: single-sentence prayers to pray as we go about our day, prayers that fit into the in-between spaces, and draw us closer to God.

I spent the next couple of months researching. I revisited my extensive library of Christian books and books on prayer from my years as a book reviewer for Sonlight Curriculum. I would often think, Oh, that’s right—I want to retell that story, as I gathered up some of the precious jewels I’d gathered over the years.

After I wrote and organized the emails, I tested them with my Sunday school group.

I wrote a book about Nehemiah, one of my favorite prayer people in the Bible. (He prayed for four months, and then he rebuilt the wall in two! A dramatic, lovely story of transformation.)

All was well.

I went to launch the Prayer Refresh to my list of friends, thinking that all my sixty people would be excited to learn about prayer. I had little gifts to mail out for a nominal fee.

Five people signed up: my mom, my sister, two friends I bribed, and one other.

All of them wrote to me at different times over the next few weeks to say, “This is changing my life.”

Which I loved … but I would also cry, because I wanted the reach to be more than five.

Lord, if you can change five people’s lives, why not 500,000? Why not five million?

(You can be one of them!)

Jesus, thank you that you invite us to do unexpected things. Thank you for the way you speak into our lives, and sometimes a single sentence of someone else’s stories causes something in us to leap up. Thank you for curiosity and the way you put your heart and your creativity into your people, and then let us appropriate for ourselves the parts that resonate. Thank you, Jesus. You are beautiful. Amen.

On to Part 5: Pay Someone to Pray for Me?