It's Gods Business

God and His/Our Business

It was just one of those days, in the best possible sense. We were busy busy from the very start. We had three car loads of donations to our charity shop waiting for us and another huge car load arrived within 15 minutes – we had arranged to open early to take this delivery. All hands on deck and they were busy hands too. Before long, yet another load of donations arrived just to add to the mayhem.

We had an object lesson in God’s provision today. While other charity shops are telling their volunteers not to come in because they have plenty of staff and very little to do, we are busy. While other charity shops are putting up large posters in their windows almost begging for more donations, we have not just ‘enough’ but blessing after blessing after blessing. We only have a small shop but we kept six people extremely busy all day today. I actually kept out of the girls way in order to straighten out both the stock room, and the prayer room. Both had almost gotten clogged up with ‘stuff’ dumped on the floor.

We saw God’s hand and blessing upon us today. Although close to a minor panic because of all the stuff to be sorted and sifted, there was an air of excitement that God was blessing us in the midst of a dry season locally. And we had plenty of customers too and takings were good to match donations. It was almost surreal.

I feel there is an object lesson here for Christian businesses everywhere. We have stuck to our founding principles as well as sound business principles.

-         We made sure and continue to make sure that we are heading the direction God wants us to go. This is done by prayer and our board, and our continually seeking God.

-         We begin every day with prayer asking for blessing on all who enter the business that day as well as for the staff. Without prayer we have noticed a direct correlation to ‘good’ days and ‘bad’ days. No prayer = no good.

-         We try to turn goods round quickly so as to show fresh stock all the time. If shoppers come in regularly they don’t want to see the same old stock for sale – they are always looking for something new.

-         We set our prices at probably the lowest in town and people come from miles around to visit, many of them regularly. This is our sales differentiator. We know that our prices are the best value around because our customers continually tell us so. Staff from other charity shops regularly come to us for themselves.

-         We engage every person who comes into the shop and we pray with quite a few of them. Too many shops treat customers almost as a nuisance but we like to treat them as a little bit special. We engage them if they want to talk or we leave them alone if they don’t. We hope that the shop and staff carry the presence of Jesus and that customers notice it. Many say that they do notice a difference in our shop.

-         We have prayer boards up where people can write and pin prayer requests anonymously – they can also record answers too. This is another clincher. Many people will never ask for prayer nor will they even accept it if offered. However, they will almost always leave a written, maybe anonymous, prayer request pinned on the board.

-         We keep the charities that we support very prominent and well advertised. People who use charity shops like to see where their money goes. We support a good mix of overseas and local charities – and people seem to like that.

This is why we like to keep God at the centre of our business. It is His business and we want to run it in His way.