Saving Your Business and Marriage Comes Down to Who’s in Control
Updated: Jan 7, 2021
I played chess growing up. My high school team took 5th place in the state of Florida. I was 32nd in the state. I still drive around with my chess set in my trunk ready for a game when I’m challenged.
Chess is a combination of having strategies memorized from previous games so that you can move fast because you always have to play out 21 moves into the future for every turn. This means that before I make my next move, I had to play out the rest of the game in my head.
Sometimes this didn’t work out so well because the clock is ticking and I’m losing valuable time playing all the variations and sequences out. If I didn’t move fast, I could lose on time. This happened to me several times. And when the clock is ticking at the end, I make mistakes because of the pressure of the clock winding down.
I’ll admit that I get paralyzed sometimes in business too because I want to understand everything. I want to see the big picture. I play out all the moves in advance, and I get stuck sometimes.
It’s probably due to all the chess I played that I developed the habit of thinking so many moves in advance. I want to UNDERSTAND because I want to WIN. I want to put myself in the best position to come out victorious.
The problem is that I don’t know what the chess player will do on the next turn. He could do something different than I thought, and now I have to rethink the entire thing.
When we entrepreneurs overthink things in our business and marriage, it can leave us stuck, paralyzed, and so much “in control” that we end up doing nothing well. We have no idea what tomorrow will bring, and this scares us.
But that’s not how God designed things. If we want to experience breakthroughs in marriage, and we’re looking for God’s guidance along the way (which I’m assuming we all are), then we have to learn to give up this insatiable need to understand everything and trust God.
The bible says:
Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; (Proverbs 3:5 NIV)
When you face issues in your business and marriage, you have to trust that God is working in ways that you have no idea about. Even when you don’t “feel” He’s at work, He is.
It’s not your job to understand exactly what He’s doing. It’s your job to stay positive and trust Him.
You may EVENTUALLY be exposed to how He took you through the breakthrough. The holy spirit might reveal all the little signs along the way that got you through the storm. God does that AFTER the fact so that you can testify to others about the victory! But even that is not guaranteed. Sometimes it will remain a mystery forever.
And you have to be cool with NOT understanding today, tomorrow, and forever.
It’s been a personal struggle for me to let go of needing to know everything. I thought I had it all planned out for my marriage. I thought I had the perfect plan for growing my 7-figure business. But the more I tried to control it, the more frustrated I became.
Maybe God’s already working, and we may not see it. All we need to know is that the victory is already there. How it comes about is not up to us. We need to do our part – be faithful, be hopeful, and let God do what He can only do.
One thing is for certain – the breakthrough won’t come the way we expect it!
Ask any successful person today if the way they got there is exactly how they planned it – 11 out of 10 of them will say NO WAY!
God expects us to stay positive, be hopeful, keep driving, keep pushing, keep fighting for truth, keep persevering for justice, keep serving, keep leading, and remain focused on moving forward. Leave the HOW to God.
We need to put our marriage and business in God’s hands and stand confident knowing we can both trust and depend on Him to bring the breakthroughs.
We need to believe He’s working for our good. And when this is all over, He’s going to use our experiences to help so many others! God wants you to understand AFTER He’s done. Then we’ll hopefully never make those same moves in the past, and we’re ready for the next challenges that God wants us to overcome in our business and marriage.
Remember how I told you chess is a game of knowing your past so you can make moves faster in the present time? Without knowing the past, it makes it harder to move in the present because we’re stuck trying to understand the future. That was my problem with chess.
Similarly, the more we see how God’s worked in the past, the easier it becomes living, loving, and making moves in the present.
Today, we need to let God know we trust Him, we thank Him for our past Victories, and we stay present and focused on moving how He wants us to move today and give Him control of the future.
God knows all and sees all. He’s the best chess player in the world because He already knows how it will all end!
God will be faithful to us when we put all our trust in Him.
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