What I did this summer.

I spent another week on the beautiful South Carolina coast!  My beach reading was Howard Schultz's first book entitled Pour Your Heart Into It:  How Starbucks Built A Company One Cup At A Time.  I gained new business insight.  The most eye opening was how valuable good people are to business success.  It lead me to pray for our business and its future. 

And now, I must eat crow.  Yum.  In my Beth Moore Bible study this morning, my own judgmental words against Starbucks founder Howard Schultz came to my mind.  Mrs. Moore wrote, "You may be encouraged to realize that God can be hard at work in our workplace without our earthly boss ever acknowledging it."  Well, there it is.  I was wrong.  God is hard at work at Starbucks and all I could do was judge.  Forgive me, Lord.  You don't need him to acknowledge anything.  And, I just need to keep my mouth shut, or should I say my fingers still!

I also enjoyed reading Maxine Clark's book The Bear Necessities of Business.  She is the founder of the Build-A-Bear retail store chain.  It is an easy to read back to the basics book for starting a company.  I used parts of it in our new business plan.

Another end of summer highlight is the beginning of our second Bible study here in the hotel.  We are four sessions into Beth Moore's Stepping Up: A Journey through the Psalms of Ascent.  It is a study she produced back in 2007.  She said in the introduction that God has designated this time for you to do this study.  I dropped my chin, mouth gaping.  Could it be true?  We are five years from when it came out.  One could argue we are behind the times.  God knows best!!!  She said that this study is to take us to a level higher with him.  Oh, how exciting.  I want to go up.  I suppose my revelation of this morning is one such step in the right direction.

More good news!  The hotel staff is turning the air conditioning off during our study time so the exercise room has been so much more comfortable.  Goodbye gloves! So long hat! See you later blanket! I was really hoping we would be living in a new place for this study.  We are not, yet God is still good.  He has made the room temperature much more tolerable for the three of us.

Onward and Upward!!!  Thank you, Mr. Schultz!  Thank you, Jesus!  Thank you all for reading!