Book Review - Business Boutique

Many people talk about wishing they had more money to do the things they love.  In Christy Wright’s book, Business Boutique, you can learn to take the things you love and turn them into income.  

I was hesitant to read this book at first because I have no desire to go into business.  I have tried sales a few times and had no success.  However, if I had this book back then, I might have done better.  Also, I find that many of the strategies in the book apply to any career or life ministry a person is in.  I have personally applied this information to the growth of the Dream Catcher ministry with great success.

The book starts not with sales or marketing, but with what you love in life.  Christy’s premise is that your business should be based around your passion.  The ‘why’ behind your business is more important than the what or the how.  She want to help people make money doing what they love. 

The rest of the book is a well-laid out plan for starting and running a business.  The reader is instructed on how to develop a vision and set goals.  Christy addresses issues that hold people back such as common fears, misconceptions about sales, and how to find resources you need.  Only then does she get into the nuts and bolts of running a business. This includes production, pricing, marketing, and record-keeping. She also clearly explains the legal stuff like setting policies and paying taxes.  

If you follow the steps in the book and complete each assignment given, by the end of the book you will have a business plan written and be ready to jump into success.  

A Big Dream

“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s 1st Woman President

Well, I have a dream that scares me.  It is something that I could never accomplish on my own.  It feels completely out of reach and unrealistic, but I am beginning to think that God planted it in my heart.

So here is the vision:

You walk into a small storefront filled with art and handmade craft items.  There is everything from jewelry, to pottery, to clothes, to art.  Along one wall is a bakery counter where delicious snacks are on sale.  All of these items have been made by local artisans.  Most of them recently lived below the poverty line.  They have chosen to use their God-given skills to serve others and improve their finances.  

If you were to go behind the scenes you would find a commercial kitchen.  The local business people use this resource to make food to sell here as well as at the farmer’s market.  Some of the clients run a delivery service selling food to the community.  Two nights a week a local non-profit uses the kitchen and the attached dining room to serve a free community meal. Lastly, the kitchen is used for a cooking club that teaches people to cook healthy meals on a tight budget.

The dining room is also used for finance mentoring classes as well as a place for the business owners to meet and support each other.  

Farther down the hall there are several workrooms.  These are rented out to any artisan that needs a work space to create their products.  Some of the rooms have tools that are shared by the workers.  For example, one is set up for woodworking, another for creating jewelry. The artists can be sell their creations on their own or put them in the storefront.

The purpose of the whole building is to support people who are seeking to catch the dreams God has placed in their hearts.

I am asking for your prayers as we seek a suitable place to make this dream a reality.   May God bless you as you seek His dreams for your life.

A New Ministry and a New Dream

In the past few years, I have become increasingly interested in helping people who live in poverty to rise above these circumstances.  I’ve done research and become involved in several charity organizations.  There are a lot of great people in the world fighting this battle.

However, I feel that so much of what we do only helps for today.  It does not reach the core issues that keep people poor.  I want to do something that actually begins to turn people’s destinies.  

I have been blessed in the past year to work with a few families that have taught me so much about what it truly means to live in poverty. They have shared their struggles and their hopes.  I’ve gotten a window into their circumstances and their decisions.  Most importantly, I’ve seen their hearts and their dreams.  These are good people who want to change their lives. 

For these reasons, I am starting a new ministry called Dream Catchers.  The mission is to see people take hold of the dreams God has placed in their hearts and live an abundant life.  We will be focusing on stewardship of not just finances, but health and spiritual gifts/talents as well.  Even though the name is new, the ministry actually started over a year ago.  We have seen amazing changes in people. 

Please pray for this group as we continue this work.

Check out our success story “Rising Out of Poverty” in this blog

Participate (it’s for everyone) and Refer Others

- if you are local we meet at New Beginnings Church 817 N. Scenic, Alamogordo,NM on the 2nd and 4th Mondays of the month at 7:30pm.

Send me your ideas and stories about people rising out of poverty.

Consider donating your time or resources to our project.

Thank you for taking the time to read about my new dream.  God bless you.

You are Valuable

I love this little cactus.  There it is bravely growing out of a boulder.  It epitomizes 

one of my favorite quotes: Do the best you can, with what you have, where you are.

However, I can imagine one day a hiker goes by and remarks about how small and

ordinary the cactus is.  Maybe he even says something like, "You could be big and

strong, and beautiful if you tried, but you are just pitiful."

I imagine the cactus' first reaction is anger. He cries out, "You don't know me.  You 

don't know how little dirt I have or how few raindrops I get.  I'm doing my best!"

But then the hiker leaves, and the little cactus is left with only his insecurities.  Maybe he is puny and weak and ugly.  Maybe he will never be anything valuable or beautiful.  

Maybe he should just give up. 

Little cactus - don't be ashamed of who you are.  Your value does not come from the opinions of those around you.  It comes from a Heavenly Father who looks down and sees how courageously you struggle against all the challenges of life.  He sees how miraculous and beautiful you are.  He sees the real you, and he loves you always and forever.  

My Offering

Once a year, on July 4th, I host a party.  Hospitality really is not my gift.  I do not have that ability to get a big meal on the table all at the same time.  My house is always too cluttered and never clean enough to feel comfortable bringing in a crowd.  Still, I am a pastor's wife, so there is some expectation there.  Plus, our front yard happens to have a great view of the city's fireworks show.  Thus, a tradition was born.

It's really not a bad party to host.  Everyone brings a snack and a lawn chair and sits in the front yard to visit until the show starts.  Most people never even enter the house.  We do eat dinner with my husband's parents ahead of time.  This year I even managed to get the meal on the table almost on time.  Then we set up the snack table and some chairs in the front and wait for guests to arrive.  Last year I obsessed about making several cute snacks and decorating the table.  It turned out there was too much food since everyone eats dinner before they come anyway.  So this year, one simple veggie pizza and drinks was all I made.  Once people arrived, the snack table filled up quickly anyway.

So, I could have sat down to enjoy my company and commend myself on pulling off a simple but effective party.  Unfortunately, that's not how my brain works.  I obsessed that it was not fancy. I worried that people were not having fun. I just knew I was not doing this hostess thing right.  Then the fireworks were cancelled due to wind.  So, basically the point of the party was a flop. I felt like a failure.

I stayed in a funk for a few days about all this.  Those ugly voices that live in my head had a heyday.  Why are you such a disappointment?  Why can't you do more?  What's wrong with you?

Finally, today I realized that this is my offering.  It is what I have to give.  It is not like others who are differently gifted, but it is my best.  I can ask no more of myself than that.  Like the widow's mite, it is precious to God because it comes from my heart.  It is not a disappointment to Him, and that is what really matters.  

Creation Care (also know as environmental protection)

Creation care is the idea that God expects his people to take care of the earth that he created for them to enjoy.  This topic is near to my heart possibly because until about three years ago it had no place in my life.  I grew up thinking that environmentalism was for those liberal, tree-hugging fanatics.  I realize now how judgmental and short-sighted that was.  The same God who cares for me also cares for the lilies of the field, and He expects me to care as well.

The case for creation care can be found in many places in the Bible:

Genesis 1.31 says, “God saw everything He had made and behold it was very good.”  All of creation was deemed ‘very good’ by its creator.  Man might be the height of God’s work, but the land, the water, and the animals are all valuable to him.

Genesis 2.15 “The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it.”  This was the first job given to mankind – to take care of the garden.  God could have made the earth self-sustaining, but as in many things, He chose to include humanity in the process.  It is our responsibility to be caretakers of the environment where we live. 

There are so many more examples of how important creation is in scripture, but I will only highlight one more.  This one is a warning.  Revelations 11.18 “The nations raged, but your wrath came, the time for the dead to be judged…and for destroying the destroyers of the earth.”  That is pretty intense.  God’s final judgments will include punishing those who have participated in the destruction of the earth.  I would venture to say that includes all of us to some extent.

Although these scriptures resonate with my spirit now, my road to creation care did not start with the Bible.  It started with stewardship and decluttering.  A few years ago, I was cleaning out and organizing my daughters’ craft room.  I had a bag for supplies they did not need that we could give away.  I also had a bag for trash.  The trash bag filled up quickly over and over again.  It had never bothered me to throw out a little paper here and there, but suddenly those bags full of paper bothered me.  I knew that paper could be recycled into new material if I only took the time to sort it and take it to the local drop off.  I began to compare throwing that usable resource away to throwing away money.  If I put it in the trash, then companies would cut more trees, process more paper and sell it.  I was feeding a machine that was wasting natural resources as well.  I was not stewarding all that God had put in my hands.  That day I labeled a box for paper recycling and put it in our kitchen.  It took many hours of research and phone calls to find out what our small town could recycle and where the drop offs were, but soon I had four labeled trash cans in my kitchen for glass, tin, plastic, and paper.  I had joined the green team.

Recycling was a very small beginning, but it got me started.  During my research, I began to read about the problems with trash in general.  I knew that certain things, especially plastic, did not degrade well.  What I didn’t know is that nothing degrades well in a landfill.  It does not break down and return to the earth as I had imagined.  It actually gets entombed with no oxygen to help the disintegration process.  One archeological type dig done in a landfill found a 50-year-old newspaper that could still be read. The material in a landfill also mixes together and forms a toxic sludge called leachate.  Modern landfills have a plastic liner to keep this liquid out of the water supply, but they do crack and leak sometimes.  Landfills also cause Methane gas.  So, everything we do to reduce our contribution to landfill trash protects the earth.  This realization led me to analyze my trash creation.  Before recycling, we were putting out two large bags of trash every week.  Recycling cut that back, but I wanted to do more.  The next step was eliminating disposable items.  Bye-bye paper plates and napkins.  Hello, pretty cloth napkins, reusable water bottles, and cloth face wipes.  I also looked for ways to buy products with less packaging.  Thrift stores and bulk grocery items are great for this. 

The next realization my research brought me to was the misuse of plastic.  How can it be ok to take a limited natural resource like oil, create a flimsy item like a plastic bag or cup that is used for a very short time and then thrown away to possibly never degrade or even worse end up in the ocean where plastic molecules now outnumber plankton?  Talk about waste and destruction!  So, the next step was to reduce plastic usage.  I gradually replaced my plastic containers with glass ones.  I didn’t want those toxins leaching into my food anymore anyway.  I bought a glass water bottle, and of course, started using reusable bags when shopping.  I’ve explored alternatives to Ziploc bags with limited success.  Yes, you can freeze food in glass containers, but those bags fit so much nicer and in the long-term glass storage promotes freezer burns sooner.  Sometimes I wash and reuse my plastic bags and sometimes I’m lazy and throw them away.  I console my guilt with the knowledge that I’m doing so much better than I was before.

My environmental journey also brought me back to food.  In my life, it seems that all roads lead back to food.  I began to explore the idea that processed food was bad for the environment and bad for my body.  The extra packaging and the chemicals had to go.  I began to learn to cook with real ingredients.  I increased the amount of fresh vegetables in my diet.  I started cooking and freezing my own meals so I did not have to rely on fish sticks and Lean Cuisine.  Then I started learning about meat.  Between Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and the movie Food Inc, I knew I no longer wanted to eat industrially produced meat.  I didn’t want to contribute to animals living tortured lives even before they were killed for my plate.  I didn’t trust all the chemicals, antibiotics, bacteria, and disease running rampant in this system.  However, I was not ready to go vegetarian.  This was a problem.  I looked for alternatives.  For me, the answer was respectfully raised, grass-fed, free-range, organically fed meat.  I found resources online and my local health food store had options.  Then I was blessed to find three local ranchers who were selling meat.  I could visit the farm, ask questions about their philosophy and eat their products guilt-free.  I may go vegetarian/vegan someday, but for now, this fits my values.

There are many other steps I’ve taken and so many others I still need to explore.  I imagine I still do many things that would qualify as destroying the earth, but I also know I am treading much lighter on the earth than I used to.  I am also more aware of my actions and looking for ways to care for this beautiful gift God has given us all.

Rising Out of Poverty

         In Acts chapter 3 Peter and John see a man begging at the temple gate.  The man had been lame all his life and this was his only way to survive.  Daily he laid there and asked for donations so he could eat. There were no government assistance programs back then so his only choice was to depend on charity – beg or die. When Peter saw this man, he looked at him and got his attention.  Then, as now, most people don’t look at the poor.  They are disturbing and it’s easier to ignore them.  However, Peter made personal contact.  The man expected Peter to throw him a few coins.  This would have made Peter feel good about doing his part for the poor.  He could claim some spiritual bonus points and move on.  That’s not what Peter did.  He looked beyond the surface, immediate problem.  Yes, this man was hungry and needed money for food, but that was not his real problem.  He needed a means to support himself.  So, Peter chose to let God heal the deeper problem and reinvent this man’s life.  He prayed for and declared the man’s healing by the power of Christ.  The man walked away praising God into a whole new life.

Our world today is still full of needs.  Even with all the government programs and charities, we have people dying from hunger.  Too many families go to bed not knowing if they will be able to pay their bills or end up on the street.  People fall through the cracks every day.  I volunteer at soup kitchens and food banks.  These ministries meet an urgent need, but they don’t reach the deeper problem.  They don’t provide the resources people need to rise out of poverty. 

I was inspired by Peter’s words to try to find a different way to serve the poor.  I wanted to help people become independent and financially stable.  I wanted them to see true healing in their lives.  So, with very little idea what I was doing, I grabbed a friend and jumped in.  We called the group financial advisory and a pleasant young couple from the church was willing to work with us.

This couple was in crisis.  They had recently moved into the area and were swamped with all the bills that come with a new home – set up for phone and electric, deposit and rent, etc.  They were behind on several monthly bills and had requested funds from the church.  Our first step was to set up a simple budget.  We listed all forms of income on one side of a paper and all their bills on the other side.  We sorted through all the threatening and confusing letters and receipts they had received from their landlord to determine what they actually owed.  Then we discussed options.  The couple was pleased to realize that their income actually did cover their monthly bills.  Seeing the numbers on paper instead of a pile of hungry bills, made it much more manageable.  We decided that they would pay the total amount due to the landlord.  He was the main source of their stress at that time.  Paying back rent and fees meant they would not have enough for electric so we referred them to a local program that assists people in need pay this type of bill.  We did not want them to depend on charity, but we needed to get them to a stable foundation first. 

The next day I got a phone call from my new friend.  She told me that she and her husband had prayed about the electric bill and that day someone came and bought a washer and dryer set they had been trying to sell.  This provided the exact amount they needed for the electric bill.  I was embarrassed to realize that I had not even told them to pray.  At that moment I realized that God was going to use this ministry to teach me and change me as much or more than those I was serving.

The next month I wanted to focus on buying food.  I had planned to discuss how to eat healthy on a budget and how to shop the sales.  I wanted the couple to see the benefits of spreading their food stamps out through the month instead of using the whole amount at once as they were currently doing.  We did not get far into the conversation when the man explained that his mother regularly visited and asked them to buy her food.  Since they owed her money, they did not feel able to say no.  Their only defense was to spend the whole amount so she could not coerce them more than once a month.  So much for my well-planned lesson.  That night’s discussion turned to setting boundaries and saying ‘no’ instead of how to shop sales which they were actually already good at.  The lesson I learned that night was to get to know the person I am trying to serve.  I assumed I knew the reason behind their spending habits, but I was wrong.  To help them I needed to truly see them.  That’s when the group stopped being about finances and became about life.  In the months that followed we would end up discussing parenting, health, relationships and many other things.  God was shaping all our lives.

One big lesson I learned from this couple and others I met was generosity.  Too often when we think of the poor we think of beggars.  All we hear are their requests for help.  However, if you let yourself get involved in their lives, you see the other side.  I have had numerous small gifts from poor people, not as a thank you but just because they had something they thought I might need or like.  Poor people have learned to share to survive.  If they have extra they give it away and if you have extra they are confused when you don’t give them some.  Those of us who grew up being taught to be independent and take care of ourselves see it as an attitude of entitlement.  We don’t realize that this is the way they have stayed alive. This does not mean I say yes to everyone who asks me for something. I have to have boundaries too.  However, I no longer feel used when they ask or guilty when I say no.  We are all in this life together. 

It hasn't always been easy.  We have dealt with frantic calls when food stamps were revoked, frustration and fear when homes were broken into, and numerous other setbacks. With God's grace and guidance, we moved forward.  I am so proud of the progress that first couple made.  They are now living in a nicer trailer park with a cute little yard.  They pay all their bills.  They are working on starting a small-business in hopes of getting off government assistance.  One day they plan to buy their own home.  More importantly, they love Jesus and are active in ministry.  God has done a great work in their lives and in mine.