Day 2 of the Path to Profitability Retreat

“Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so.” I heard little children, one of them being me, sing this Christian song over and over, yesterday during an exercise on business lineage. So, what is a business lineage. Well the word, “lineage” means where you come from. Like I came from a long line of Scot Irish people on my mother’s side and from a strong English influence on my father’s side. That’s my family lineage, which we also explore in depth and perhaps I’ll share about that powerful experience another time, but this is about what I learned about my business lineage, which is where the services of Life On Purpose Institute and what we provide to our clients came from.

Let me see if I can explain this powerful insight that left me prostrate with gratitude, tears of love and acceptance flowing from my eyes, that came to me during Day 2 of the Path to Profitability Retreat.

Each business has a lineage, various streams from which the business has arisen. For small/micro businesses like Life On Purpose Institute, the lineage comes from the history and lineage of the individual. While there are many different streams that come together to form the overall business lineage, there are often 2-3 which primarily influence and shapes the business.

So, some of these for Life On Purpose Institute are:

• My former career as a veterinarian,

• My ‘dark night of the soul’ experience of burning out,

• My background as a freelance writer primarily writing for magazines

• My spiritual background and desire for Life On Purpose to be an expression of that background

• My background and training with Werner Erhard and Associates which later became Landmark Education and the study of ontology which is the foundation of Werner’s work.

So, what does this all have to do with my hearing the children song about Jesus. Just this. I have acknowledged for many years that one of the primary lineages of Life On Purpose Institute is that it is a spiritually based enterprise. What I realized in the early part of this exploration is that more specifically, Life On Purpose Institute is based primarily in New Thought spirituality and principles. After all, for the past 20 years, I’ve embraced and explored the New Thought spiritual path, including the 13 years that Life On Purpose Institute as been in existence.

But what became evident yesterday — at first alarmingly so — is that a part of this spiritual lineage includes my Southern Baptist upbringing, which includes some very clear memories of attending the Louisburg Baptist Church with my family and where my grandmother was one of the adult Sunday School teachers for years. And where I learned that “Jesus loves me this I know because the Bible tells me so.”

But I’ve been embarrassed to let people know this about me. I’ve been embarrassed about my Christian lineage because over the years I’ve evolved away from many of the beliefs of conservative and fundamental Christianity that makes up much of the Southern Baptist dogma. That doesn’t mean it’s not part of my lineage, just a part that has had to go underground.

Contrarian Christian??

After this powerful exercise that brought all this to the surface I went to the Internet and looked up the words to the childhood song I still heard reverberating in my head. It’s the refrain that I heard, not the verses which I hardly even recognized. The refrain is:

Jesus loves me! This I know,
for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to him belong;
they are weak, but he is strong.

Now, I can claim the portion of this lineage that still calls to me from my heart and release the rest.

So I claim, “Jesus loves me, this I know…” I don’t really need to Bible to tell me so. I can feel in my heart, in my personal experience with the Divine that this is so.

Interestingly enough, from this revelation has also come the openness to also explore the Bible in a way that I’ve not previously been open to. I guess, maybe, in this place I don’t want to be told what to do.

I don’t know where this will all lead. I do feel this was what I would term a ‘mega insight’ and I trust that such mega insights can be both healing and transforming at a personal level as well as in the business, so we will see.

And as always, I would enjoy your comments if you are so inclined.