Shoot for the stars? Why Eph 3:20 takes you beyond the stars

Cool car or cool driver?

Work ethic

Before you quit…

Young entreprenuer is cleaning up the soap industry with natural competition

Adriana Gasaway became an entreprenuer by accident.

During the quarantine, she started mixmashing ingredients in search of more natural body butter. Ever since she took medical classes at West Coast College to get her ultrasound degree, she had an aversion for the long list of chemical ingredients with questionable health impact.

Her first creation was mango body butter and her friends loved it. She kept cooking up stuff and now has 3 different scents to her body butters and four soaps: mango, milk and honey, charcoal and coffee. She’s added sea moss to her repertoire which she vetted herself by traveling to Saint Lucia to check out her supplier. It boosts the immune system.

She started hawking bars and butters at events and at Earle’s Restaurant in Crenshaw district of Los Angeles. An entrepreneur was born. The career in ultrasounds got sidelined.

“I like this better, although it’s good to have something under my belt to fall back on,” she says.

With an unrepressible effervescence, Adriana was promoting her products on July 17 at the Amazing Grace arts festival. Customers were drawn by the smile and the sweet voice. They walked away with bars of soap in their bags.

Only 23, she’s young big dreamer. According to her dreams, the future holds financial stability, owning a house, having a family.

“This is what I put all my energy into,” she says. “I really like meeting new people and hearing the feedback on my products. It gives me energy.” Here’s her website A.C.E. Naturals and her Instagram page.

So far, she’s paying her own rent with her business. Tomorrow, she’ll take over the world.

Fear not (in business)

Overcome your fears. Make money.

The Beauty of Being in Business is…

You can start a side hustle and make money. Let’s talk.

Effort twice as good as talent

I called my YouTube channel Christians get rich because there are good reasons and good ways for this to happen.

MSIs

What are MSIs? Why do you need them?

Hint: Multiple Streams of Income
You need them in case one stream dries up. Or doesn’t produce enough.

Get your own MSIs.

Kelly, 36. Patrick, 8. His Jesus dream made no sense…

In a Juvenile Hall Bible study, Kevin Knuckles asked snarkily if all the biblical authors were schizophrenics, and he was promptly kicked out.

“I was hate-filled violent man addicted to drugs,” Kevin admits on his YouTube channel. “I was really against Christ for a lot of my life.”

A derisive arrogance prevailed in Kevin’s heart starting from the moment he discerned his Irish parents’ oppressive Catholic hypocrisy all the way up to the time he told his wife to trash her Bible or say goodbye.

As a member of an international dark-themed rock band, Kevin lived the life of drugs and adultery for most of his adult life. He would lock himself in his room to shoot up heroin but then — looking for a cheap substitute — abused methadone, which is supposed to transition addicts from heroin.

He lived with his lover and neglected his wife and kids, who knew about the betrayal of trust.

“I pushed my family beyond the breaking point,” he says. “I was quite literally dying. I thought I was living my best life. But my condition was so broken.”

Trying to detox after two methadone overdoses, Kevin writhed in emotional turmoil and physical agony for days on end with no rest. He was vomiting and couldn’t sleep.

“I was in the pits of despair and couldn’t take it any further,” Kevin remembers. While he had mocked Christianity for most of his life, he now cried out to God. “I said God, please have mercy on me.”

Nothing happened that night, but the next night he cried out again, this time to Jesus. Then something remarkable transpired.

“I was in a fetal position shaking, sweating, unable to find any peace in my body or my mind,” he recalls. “As soon as I invoked his name (Jesus), I was given complete peace and rest. Even though I had spent most of my life blaspheming him and not believing in him and making fun of people who did, I was so broken and had nowhere else to turn that I just called out to him.”

For the first time in days, Kevin slept that night

“I immediately found peace, my body stopped trembling, my temperature and heart rate regulated,” he recalls.

He dreamed a profound dream that seemed so intensely real that it seemed more of a memory of a real event than a nebulous fabrication of the sandman.

“I couldn’t remember anything from the dream except two things,” he remarks. “One was the dream was about my wife, Kelly, whom I had committed much adultery against and put through much turmoil. And the other was the number 38.”

It was eerie.

Kevin fell asleep and had another dream that again gave him the overwhelming sensation that it was a real event. But again, he couldn’t remember anything about the circumstances — except for two random facts, like the first dream.

“All I could remember was that it was about my son, Patrick, and the number eight,” he says.Read the rest: Jesus dream saves addict.

When discouraged, keep doing right things

The bane of most is to succumb to discouragement, to compromise your values, to lower your sights, to throw out your dreams in search of pleasure instead of goals.

Keep believing in higher goals, even when others don’t believe in you, when others ridicule your dreams and scoff at your possibilities. Keep doing right things in the midst of overwhelming discouragement.

This is the trademark of Joseph, who, sold into slavery, kept serving his God with enthusiasm, who, next incarcerated for a crime he didn’t commit, continued in the straight and narrow. When his day came, he became vice president of Egypt and saved the very people who nearly killed him.

This is the trademark of Daniel, who was ripped from his homeland and taken captive to a foreign land. With no discernible future, he steadfastly served God and wound up distinguishing himself from all those who settled for less.

This is the trademark of David, who, shunned by his own brothers and fathers, believed it important to practice his aim and took on bears in lions in defense of lambs. He thought one day his skills would be useful for taking down giants. And God gave him big things.

Let this be our trademark.

Don’t let them destroy your dream

People are nasty. You have a dream, and they want to destroy it. You must guard your heart against evil people. Don’t let them assassinate your vision, your self belief. Hold on to your dream and pursue. Believe in yourself and in God. He will make a way.

Original image from Pinterest.

Can Christians dream?

Elon Musk figured it would be better to build his own rockets after the Russians offered to sell him a retro-fitted ICBM for a sky-high price (yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, the pun is bad). Then Musk — who owns Tesla electric sports cars and is making lithium batteries for your home that charge at night when electricity is cheaper — decided he would still save more money by landing the first stage booster (to be re-used). He almost landed it on a floating barge this month, as you can see from the video.

When I read about the technological advances (Musk is contracting for NASA), I see men and women who dream.

Can Christians dream to do great, unthinkable things for God?

They carved a road through the rock walls

When Chinese government demurred on the multi-million dollar road construction, 13 men from the isolated Guoliang village took matters into their own hands.

They sold their livestock to buy hammers and chisels. Without civil engineering, they took five years to chip their way through almost a mile of solid rock. The resulting road — 15 feet high and 12 feet wide — opened the remote and inaccessible village to tourism and saved the town, but one of the original 13 lost his life in the construction.

It was a good thing they didn’t realize that what they wished to do was “impossible” for villagers lacking power tools and proper training. By having faith in their dreams, they defied the naysayers and gambled everything on their future. The wager — and the work — paid off.

God’s greatest work comes

at a time of your greatest adversity.

The darker it gets, the more we need to look up and believe.

Dreams