It doesn’t always go well
When things in business don’t go as you planned, it can cause cracks in your confidence.
I thought God wanted me to follow this plan.
I thought God wanted me to work together with this client.
I thought God blessed this product and now delivery is delayed.
Doubts start to arise and questions are fired at God. As a person who wants to serve God through business, it’s not always easy to understand why certain things happen in business—why it doesn’t always go well.
The thing is: it just can’t always go well. It’s a lie that it can.
Why it can’t always go well
It’s a tricky thing to say that if things go smoothly, it has God’s blessing.
So what about God’s calling for you to be an entrepreneur and it never went smoothly? Did you misunderstand?
Or what about the things that used to go smoothly and suddenly don’t? Did God take off His hands?
He could’ve taken His hands off.
But it’s more likely that He didn’t.
And it’s still very likely that He still called you to entrepreneurship.
God doesn’t just call you to business to then make you miserably fail. (Again, sometimes He does, but in most cases, He does not.)
Two reasons it can’t always go well are:
This is life
God lets something happen to shape your character
This is life
We live in a broken world. When we look at the life of Jesus, that’s clear: He healed many sick people, He ate with the outcasts and eventually was murdered for all of it. It would be a dream to think that everything in business can go well.
Heaven is not here yet.
God lets something happen to shape your character
This reason is a bit harder to take in.
If you are a parent, you don’t like your child to suffer. If he/she was running a business, you would probably help out where you can to make sure bankruptcy or any other tragedy would be out of the equation.
However, we know that love doesn’t mean that someone should be given everything they desire or that they can’t experience any difficulties or pain.
When a child needs to learn how to walk, the child will fall and hurt himself. If we would prevent the child from hurting itself, it would never learn how to walk. And a person who is fully healthy but isn’t able to walk is robbed of something completely normal and valuable.
Therefore, it’s no surprise that God uses tough circumstances to shape our character. For God, it’s about our heart and our relationship with Him in the first place. He doesn’t care how much is in our bank account or how many houses we own.
Surely, you know this, but it doesn’t make it easier when things don’t go that well.
Sometimes, we can have enormous question marks why God lets certain things happen. And they cause us to question—that might even be the harder part.
It might tempt us to give up, to change course—derailing from the original plan.
That’s when we have to lean into God even more.
How to deal when things don’t go well
There are a couple of ways to stand firm and stay confident in business when things don’t go well.
See if the following resonates with you.
Pick the ones you like and apply them.
1. Look at your goals/journals/notes
It would be wise for every business owner to write down their business vision(s) and goals. On top of that, logging your prayers with God and His guidance is even better. When you have those things written down, you can go back to them and read what He communicated back then so clearly.
This will help you to stay convinced that entrepreneurship is the road God called you to.
2. Read His word and pray
Besides looking back at how God already talked to you and guided you, you can seek guidance in the now. Reading His word and praying are always the top 2 things to do in any situation. His word is packed with promises such as, “I hear you (Psalm 55:16-17)” and “I will turn everything for good (Romans 8:28-31)”.
His promises are true. May they be an anchor of hope.
3. Ask a specific question
When it’s really hard to understand why God lets something happen, then a comforting question to ask can be this:
What do You want me to learn?
Assuming that God still wants you in business, there must be something that you can learn—something that will shape your thinking or character. As we see in most cases in the Bible, like David and Job, God shapes you in hardship. Surely, He wants to tell you what you need to learn.
It’s a lie: If you’re a Christian business owner, things should always go well
People telling you that things went miraculously well aren’t necessarily lying. It might’ve been a great journey for them.
It could be, however, that something is still coming.
Or they might have just forgotten how they overcame certain things.
C.S. Lewis says it perfectly: “The fellow-pupil can help more than the master because he knows less. The difficulty we want him to explain is one he has recently met. The expert met it so long ago, he has forgotten.”
We tend to forget what we’ve learned along the way.
Things simply can’t always go well. God doesn’t tell us that. God doesn’t say “follow Me and you will never encounter hardship.”
All disciples are examples of that.
Jesus is an example of that.
Yes, God promises prosperity.
He blesses us abundantly.
He has plans for us that are not harmful and provide hope and a future. But He doesn’t say that adversity won’t be part of that.
After all, God wants a relationship with us. He wants to be a father, and not Santa Claus.
