I remembered that at the beginning of this 3 years of unemployment, God told me to rest for 2 years, and I wanted to meditate on His word day and night and wait for Him to bring me to the next high.
I have lost that clarity at some point during that first 2 years, and because of that, 2 years became 3 years. I guessed God wanted me to really take 2 years of rest, not doing other things. He added another year because I didn’t really take rest at all.
In my first year I started to fidget. In fact, I fidgeted right from the start! 3 months into my unemployment, I joined a Network Marketing company, figuring that it wont hurt because 1) they are very positive people. 2) I feel inadequate at money, and they are personal finance company. 3) I joined that company before, but didn’t earn a dime, so I wanted to pick up on where I fell. 4) If anything goes wrong, I can always quite. It’s just a NM!
I didn’t entirely wait for God to speak before I jump on the Network-Marketing-Business-Opportunity-Build-Your-Own-Great-Financial-Empire bandwagon with both feet.
The result? Negative. Although the company has a lot of pumping-you-up talks, those are just legalism. Positiveness itself become the law, but no one truly obey it, especially my upline.
She gossiped a lot. She was the slave-driver type. Very micromanaging and belittling to her downline. I couldn’t bear it. A 9 to 5 job can’t be worst than that because at least you get a salary from it, but you take on a lot of negativity from her for nothing. You actually invest money into it for things such as travel expenses, because NM is a “business”.
Long story short, I paid dearly for departing from what God told me to do.
I didn’t stop. I moved on to Internet Marketing at the end of the 1st year. Then I kept looking for opportunity here and there. I didn’t really take rest for God and fully devoted to listen to what He wanted to say to me.
As a result, my ears became itchy to hear New Age teaching, occultic science, and money making schemes. I didn’t know what they were and was pretty innocent about those teaching at first- those were Law of Attraction, the Secret, Manifesting what you want, photoreading, memory technique, stevepavlina.com and his New Age based personal growth teaching, positive thinking, and etc.
These teachings seemed innocent at first glance, but their roots traced back to occult knowledge.
I wanted to derive success principles and formula from the spiritual realm, but was secretly leaving God out of the equation. That was what I basically did. Now God makes it clear to me: I was trying to build my own version of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11).
I totally bought into the vision of having my own business empire from the money guru, NM superstars, and their kind. I rationalized that I needed money if I was to serve God full time in the future.
Remember I mentioned in the top that I wanted to learn how to meditate on God’s word day and night? My motive for learning biblical meditation was because I wanted to receive God’s promise of prosperity. He promised that whoever meditate His word day and night will prosper (Psalm 1) But since 2004 when I first heard of this spiritual practice, I never really achieved it and obtained the promise from God.
Later I learned that trying to practice spiritual discipline without God and His Holy Spirit is essentially occult. I didn’t realize that.
This got me into the desert of mediocrity, confusion, and failures!
After I started to blog about God and what He reveals to me through the scripture in May 09, it started to change for the better. I was going back to full fellowship with the Holy Spirit and fully listen to Him. I slowly rediscovered the plan and vision He had for me. Once again, the duck went back to the water.
I am not saying that I had departed from God, but I was trying to follow two system: the world system and God’s system. On one hand, I still pray everyday and seek His will and blessing, but on the other hand, I fidgeted and my ears got itchy for knowledge and formula that could do without God.
What happen if you try to mix two incompatible systems? It breaks! It won’t work.
When I became self-centered, trying to learn from the world to solve my own problems and inadequacies, I was not able to fully embrace God and His perfect plan for me.
It’s all or nothing: Either I stop praying, and just become a Sunday Christian, and do what the world does and prosper that way, or I stop doing anything the conventional way or the successful people’s way, and do whatever God tells me to do, and leave the results to Him.
Money and success principles of men do work, but work what? They work to make you rich and success in earthly term, but not in terms of God’s perfect and unique plan for you. And you have to totally ignore the voice of God to fully embrace the self-driven way of success in order to make it works. You can’t do it half-heartedly. You can’t say, oh I want to do X and make a lot of money from that, and a while later, only to feel like hey, I feel that God is saying it’s isn’t the best path for me so let just stop.
You can’t succeed on your own term if you heed God’s voice half way through and stop what you are doing. You have to ignore Him entirely. But of course you won’t choose this way if you love God.
You have to fully embrace one or another. God’s way require total surrender. If you follow God totally, you always face something bigger than you imagine, wild beyond your comfort zone and control, and totally stare at your ego in the face. You have to hold on to faith till the end to see God comes to your aid and lifts you up at last.
When I say fully, I also mean meticulously. You have to let God gives you the green light in everything you do, what you read, where you go, which project to do, which job to apply for, which client you take, which employee you hire, what you believe, how you do anything, and everything!
You can’t just ask for a general idea or direction like I did. You can’t just finish your morning devotion and assume you can go about the rest your day and God would just make everything okay for you. You can’t just ask God to shut the doors to opportunities that He doesn’t want you to take. You have to be laser-focused.
You have to consult and communicate with Him as much as possible. You should be always ready to scrap any humanistic idea, program, plan, philosophy, and always try to do it in God’s revealed way.
So in this 3 years, I learned about curses, word of faith, end time prophecy, spiritual battle, occult, witchcraft, blessing, and many other spiritual things. If I am busy being earthly successful, I won’t be able to learn those important lessons.
I praise God that even though I was quite lost and disillusioned sometimes, He brings me back to the center of His will every time.
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