entrepreneur

It is nothing short of God’s goodness to have the desires of our hearts be slowly unfolding before us.  We have longed, for some time, after years of being separated by so many hours of work outside the home, to have a family business where all of us could work together.  We haven’t arrived yet; but little by little, our wedding business is growing and it looks as if within a year or so, it may be able to sustain us without my husband’s other full time job! (We would continue the 2 or 3 small side incomes.)

My husband is one of the hardest workers I know.  For years he has worked excessively to pay down our debts and maintain our family.  We’ve thought a lot in the last few years, about what a Christian is called to concerning work. Balance is so essential!  While we must remember that God is our ultimate Provider, blessing the labor of our hands, we also realize that battling the curses of debt requires us to do hard things, which competes with our time together and sometimes our sanity.  It has been kind of crazy!

This is our first full year to have the wedding business.  And let me just say, lest you think otherwise, there is very little glamor (if any), and a whole lot of hard work.  Self-employment is not less work, but it is freer work.

The sweetest revelation has come to me as our family has been working alongside one another.  I could talk about the value of home business for children, but I’ll save that for another day.

Last weekend, my husband and I went out for a romantic evening at Sam’s Club where we loaded up two huge carts of groceries for the coming wedding, strained to get them to the check out and breathed a sigh that we could finally go home (sipping coffee on the way, of course).

Unbeknown to us, our business account has a “security spending limit” which we exceeded.  After the cashier tried too many times to ring the sale, our bank put a security hold on all our accounts and we stood there, $650 worth of groceries (and 2 hours of loading) unable to pay, even though the money was in our account.  We finally got it figured out, got home and began the arduous job of putting them away (I told you it wasn’t glamorous.)

As we scurried around the kitchen for two days preparing food for 100 guests, de-boning chicken until midnight (laughing at ourselves for estimating and buying twice too much :-D), swapping an occasional childish prank and then high-fiving over the savory results and exclaiming together, “It’s show time!“, amid all the work and problem-solving was a sweetness of fellowship–a knitting together of our hearts from the act of working together toward a common goal.

Just as team mates share a unique bond from working, sweating, winning and losing together, so do families.  But with so many working outside the home (husbands and wives) there is a dependency that once existed within a marriage that seems to be fading away.  A dependency that the feminist movement said was bad, but one I think was good and quite intended by the Creator.

“The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.”

Since the Industrial Revolution, despite all the wonderful things it has brought, we’ve seen one of the biggest tragedies in our history:  families divided in body, mind and spirit.  And worse, others replacing those endearing positions of comrades in our life work.

And I hope this post doesn’t discourage you, because I know the reality is that most of you (as I still do) watch your husband leave in the morning, and return late in the evening, and you struggle just to keep a physical connection between you, much less an emotional one that is typically built in the climate of common industry.

Despite what is true, there is still the reality of husbands tied to corporate jobs and little we can do to change it.

But for us, and hopefully for you, we feel more inspired than ever to encourage our sons and daughters toward entrepreneurship–home industries, for so many reasons, but especially because of the bonds that are created when families build together.

It is my prayer that the Christian community will begin to consider all the possibilities that belong to us to build businesses and expand our presence in the culture.  Someone said that a culture’s greatest influence is its business owners.  Perhaps we could start thinking in that direction, supporting family businesses, networking and brainstorming about our own!

Just some random thoughts I’ve been having that I wanted to share.