God Wants YOU to Thrive
Time to have a little heart to heart about God, success, and prosperity. So many of us are taught growing up that we are supposed to suffer here on earth, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. God built this magnificent playground just for us. The beautiful sunshine, the delicious food, the music that moves our souls. God is always looking for ways to bless our lives, to surprise and delight us.
But we get stuck because we don’t really believe we’re worthy of the all the goodness and blessings that are laid out along our path. We pass them by, so caught up in our “not enoughness” that we can’t even see them laid out specifically for our pleasure.
If you grew up with a God of guilt, wrath, shame, and judgement, it can be difficult to become success-minded about your business. You want more, but guilt stands in your way. You try to talk yourself out of your desire, which creates tremendous inner conflict. (And inevitably fails anyway.) You can start to blame others, which only leads to a life of resentment.
If God didn’t want us to live abundant lives, he wouldn’t have placed us amidst all this abundance. We don’t have to choose between being “good” and being “successful”. In fact, living a life of magnificent success is the greatest gift you can give to the world and to God.
Here’s why…
When you strive for material success, two powerful things happen: You become a better, truer version of yourself, and you can help so many more people from a place of thriving.
Becoming a Better, Truer Version of Yourself
The moment I heard this phrase, “becoming a better, truer version of ourselves”, it felt like home. (From Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, a book well worth reading.) Deep down, that called to my soul. Can you feel it as well? A better, truer version of yourself. The BEST, TRUEST version of yourself.
Isn’t that truly what God is calling each of us toward? When we move closer to God, we become better, truer versions of ourselves. I believe that’s our TRUE purpose in life. To live the fullest expression of God in and through us each day. It’s why prayer and meditation are so important. It’s why it feels so good to take care of our bodies, so they can assist us in doing our work with ease.
The thing is, we can’t truly live the better, truer version if we don’t challenge ourselves. The only way to truly see our capabilities is to challenge ourselves to go beyond. Set those big, audacious, scary-as-heck goal, and see if we can rise to the challenge.
We can’t reach our material goals for success (the income, the car, the vacation) unless we GROW. Building a 6-figure business requires faith, determination, persistence, self-discipline, and a deep desire to make a difference. You must call all those characteristics forth in yourself in order to get the result you desire. Don’t they all sound like characteristics God would love to see us live by?
If you coast through life, accepting the results you’re getting, and just getting by, you aren’t calling forth the deep, divine, genius that God endowed upon you.
In fact, all those goals that you’ve written off as being too material are part of your divine calling. God is using them to entice you forward into the life you’re meant to be living. If your desire for the BMW is strong enough that it gets you moving forward to the better, truer version of yourself, isn’t that a really, really good thing?
I saw this transition in my own life. I started out very materialistic, and mostly focused on getting the “stuff”. No matter how I tried, I tried, I just couldn’t get the stuff as the version of myself that I was. That frustration led me on a journey of personal and spiritual growth that has transformed my life. Now I have the “stuff”, but I also have so much more: joy, appreciation, faith, passion, commitment.
I know that my only work each day is to allow God to work through me, and everything else takes care of itself. I also know that this is only the beginning. I know that there is still another better, truer version of me out there waiting to manifest. I can’t wait to meet her.
You Can Help So Much More When You’re Thriving
I work with a lot of psychotherapists in private practice who struggle with the idea of prosperity, abundance, and thriving. They get stuck in this notion that somehow they do better work if they are serving their clients at their own expense. This shows up in the form of undercharging, which requires them to have a caseload of way too many clients. The therapist is overworked, stressed out, and constantly on the lookout for how to “get more clients”.
Whether or not you are a therapist, just think about that for a moment. Is that the therapist YOU want trying to help you sort out your own life?
When I fell pray to this trap in my own private practice, I was not only taking on too many clients, I was also taking whatever client called me. In my scarcity mindset, my constant hustle for “more clients”, I was afraid to let any slip away. I was working with clients that weren’t the best fit to work with me.
We simply don’t do our best work when we’re struggling. Do you want your therapist to be fully, completely focused on your well-being, or do you want him to distracted by an inner dialogue about whether he can make his car payment? Therapists, I know you want this even more than your clients do. You want to be fully, completely invested in your clients well-being, and the only way to do this is to be thriving in your own life.
Whether you are a therapist or not, think about the people you “serve”… Are any of them better off when you’re struggling or stressed out?
I see this with my kids all the time. When I’m stressed out, having a bad day, or struggling with something, I’m not the mom I want to be. I’m short, I’m impatient. Everybody in my life, my kids, my clients, my team, my friends, they all benefit when I thrive, which is why I make feeling good and connecting with God my top priority every day.
Think about the people in your life. Who benefits when you thrive? Who benefits when you’re struggling? I have a pretty good guess which list is longer: the list of people who benefit when you thrive, right?
Can you use that list to give yourself permission to thrive? When you live a life of ease and abundance, you go out into the world with a completely different energy. We need that so much right now. We need YOU, the better, truer version of you, living a magnificent life, so that we can all live the better, truer versions of ourselves.
Just think of how happy that will make God.