{{first_name|Friend}},
I want to ask you something honest.
When you sit down on Monday morning to start working, what comes into your mind?
Not what you wish came into your mind.
What actually does.
For most of us, it is the list. The emails. The clients. The decisions that have been waiting since Friday.
God is somewhere. But He is not in that room.
A.W. Tozer wrote something that stopped me when I first read it:
"What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us."
Not what we say about God. Not what we believe about Him in theory.
What actually comes to mind.
And I had to be honest: when I started working, God was not what came to mind. The work was. The pressure was. The calendar was.
I loved God. I went to church. I prayed.
But my business had its own room, and God was rarely in it.
Psalm 127 says it plainly:
"Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it."
Vain does not always mean the business fails.
Sometimes vain means the business grows and you feel strangely empty anyway.
Sometimes vain means you hit the goal and immediately move to the next one because nothing you built actually satisfied what you were looking for.
Sometimes vain means you are busy, producing, and exhausted, but something inside you knows that God was not the architect.
He was on the guest list.
But He was not the builder.
The calendar is usually the most honest mirror.
Not what we say our priorities are.
What we actually made time for.
If God was really in the room when you worked this past week, what did that look like? Not what it was supposed to look like. What it actually looked like.
That question is worth sitting with.
Because it is not a guilt question. It is an invitation.
He is not standing outside your work life judging the calendar.
He is waiting to be the architect of it.
And there is a significant difference between what you build with Him in the room and what you build hoping He approves of what you built without Him.
This week, before you open the inbox on today, try something small.
Give Him the first five minutes.
Not to pray through your to-do list.
Just to acknowledge that you are walking into the work with Him, not ahead of Him.
See what shifts.
I cannot wait to hear what you notice.
In Him,
Stephen