2:37 – Anne Beiler, founder of Auntie Anne’s pretzels
7:09 – Phil Vischer, creator of VeggieTales
10:07 – Dan Cathy, CEO of Chick-Fil-A
14:33 – Tony Dungy, former head coach in the NFL
17:36 – Casey Crawford, former NLF football player and CEO of Movement Mortgage
24:18 – Kevin Sorbo, feature film & television Actor
27:59 – David Green, founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby
On today’s show, Fanchon Stinger joins us in the studio to reflect on some of their favorite moments from the Truth At Work Conference and look ahead to this year’s event on November 9th. They discuss highlights from past speakers such as Dan Cathy of Chik-fil-A and Anne Beiler of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels while previewing future speakers such as David Green of Hobby Lobby, actor Kevin Sorbo, and other guests of Bottom Line Faith.
This annual conference cultivates, encourages, and inspires leaders and those who desire to serve the Lord in the marketplace. If you want your work to have eternal significance, even if it means going against cultural norms, come, network with like-minded leaders, and learn from national experts on how to live out your faith so you can impact the marketplace for Christ.
For more information about the Truth at Work Conference, or to purchase tickets, visit truthatwork.org/conference
Full transcript:
Ray: Hello, everyone this is Ray Hilbert, your host here at Bottom Line Faith. As you know this is the program where we love to bridge the gap between faith and business in the marketplace and leadership. Today is a special program. I actually have a co-host in-studio today. I’d like you to join me in welcoming my dear friend, Fanchon Stinger. Fanchon, welcome.
Fanchon: Thank you so much I’m so excited about what we are going to do today.
Ray: We’re going to do something fun-
Fanchon: It’s going to be fun, yes.
Ray: And different. You know normally we interview one person here at Bottom Line Faith and we hear their story and so forth. But Truth at Work- we have an annual conference, it occurs every fall. As we are recording this program, we are in our seventh year, and you are our MC for that event.
Fanchon: I’m honored to be the MC. You know, Ray, out of everything I do every year, all the events I do, all the speaking–
Ray: And you do a lot.
Fanchon: –all the traveling. I tell people this all the time, this is the most important event, to me, of the year, and it is because we are truly giving people what they need to succeed in their faith and really in their life. So this is really such important work and what a blessing, the people we get to learn from, on this day.
Ray: Yeah, without question and that’s kind of a great segue, because what we thought we would do on this episode of Bottom Line Faith is bring you into the studio as the MC for our event. We’re kinda just going to celebrate these amazing speakers that we’ve had over the years. We are going to do a couple of things. We’re going to listen and hear from some previous high profile speakers. We have some of the best in the world.
Fanchon: You’ll recognize most of them probably.
Ray: Yeah, it’s going to be people that you know, you’re going to recognize, you’re going to love what you’ll hear from them, and we’re also going to hear from some of the speakers for the 2018 event. The event as of itself happened taken place as of the recording–
Fanchon: It’s action-packed. It’s going to be so great. Yeah.
Ray: –but they’ve all been guests here at Bottom Line Faith prior to this. So, you might be listening to this program right before the event, which is November 9th, 2018, or you might be listening to this after the event. So, Fanchon, are you ready to get started?
Fanchon: Let’s do it, I’m excited.
Ray: But, one of my favorite guests in all the years was Anne Beiler. Anne Beiler is the founder, literally, and creator of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels. My wife will tell you she loves the wheat pretzels with the hot caramel sauce.
Fanchon: Oh, I haven’t had that one.
Ray: It’s a good one. But she was our guests, one of our speakers-
Fanchon: Yeah, so gracious.
Ray–Of 2017.
Fanchon 2017, yes. 2017.
Ray Conference.
Fanchon Yes.
Ray: And let’s listen to a soundbite from Anne, and then we are going to come back and see what it means to us.
Anne: At that point, I decided to stop whining about what I didn’t have. You all know you can do nothing with what you don’t have. I know that’s so profound. But, really how much time do we spend wish we would have something that somebody else has? You can do nothing with what you do not have. When we focus though on what we have over time, we realize that what we have is far greater than what we don’t have.
Ray: Fanchon, what an amazing quote from Anne Beiler. The context of her comments there was, she had previously just talked about, that she did not get her high school diploma until age fifty.
Fanchon: Fifty-years-old, yeah.
Ray: And how for her whole life that could have held her back from great successes. But she never focused on what she didn’t have.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: She focused on the gifted and passions that God had given her. What are your thoughts around that?
Fanchon: Well, it’s so funny because so often when we bring these speakers in you, and I really get to know them behind the scenes and when Anne came in she and I clicked right away, and I really didn’t understand the depths of why she and I clicked. But her book, Twist of Faith, goes into a little bit more detail about her story and here she’s talking about how easy it is to compare ourselves to each other. In terms of being a leader that can be such an obstacle, that can turn into such an obstacle that the enemy can use against us. Anne, when she talks about how they came up with the recipe for those Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, which I’ve already said is my favorite pretzels, I know where every Auntie Anne’s stands are in every airport that I travel in, that’s how much I love them. I told her that, she cracked up. But when they started their business, they did not have a recipe for a good pretzel. Their pretzels were basically not that great. They did not know that they had, within all of that looked like a mess, the recipe for the most successful pretzel company in the world.
Ray: That’s right, that’s right, and I remember I got a chance to talk to her a little as well, and I said, you know, “Anne, when you come to speak at an event, like here at the Truth at Work Conference, do you get asked to bring samples?”
Fanchon: Right.
Ray: Right? You have to bring samples, and I remember her telling me, she said, “I get asked that all the time,” She said, “we never do it because,” she said, “it’s got to be perfect, it’s got to be perfect for the customer to have the experience-”
Fanchon: That’s true.
Ray: “That it is designed for them to have and it just sits around too long in the sample setting.” and that sort of thing. So, what you just talked about, it was a miracle.
Fanchon: It’s a miracle.
Ray: Like literally, a one-in-ten-million shot how they came about. You can read about it in her book.
Fanchon: Her book is fascinating.
Ray: And so it was a miracle that that recipe came together. It wasn’t by her design-
Fanchon: It was her husband.
Ray: It was her husband. It was a miracle, and she said we are only going to serve it with perfection.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: And that is the incredible height of commitment that Anne has and her faith-
Fanchon: And detail.
Ray: To business.
Fanchon: If you think about those pretzels you always smell them before you see them. No, seriously that’s probably why she is saying that because she doesn’t want them sitting around. Because part of the Auntie Anne’s experience is smelling them before you enjoy them and she talks about in the book about watching people’s faces in terms of how much that meant to her in terms of people enjoying those pretzels.
Ray: Yeah.
Fanchon: Incredible, those are good pretzels, but boy there is a deep story in there for success, confidence, and faith. I mean to look at anything but just to have the faith that God knows and it if doesn’t look like it is coming together, you have no idea what he is doing.
Ray: That’s right.
Fanchon: Or where He has you.
Ray: She will tell you she was the least likely, least qualified for this kind of success and yet one of the most successful women, let along Christian business women, in the country’s history and it wasn’t because of her qualifications it was because of her calling.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: She talked about that. So, Fanchon, while we are on this topic of calling and what we are to pursue in our calling. One of my favorite speakers of all time that we had at our conference was Phil Vischer.
Fanchon: Yeah, Veggie Tales.
Ray: Yeah, the creator of Veggie Tales. I think it was 2016.
Fanchon: Yep.
Ray: That he was at the conference and let’s listen to this clip and see what we can learn from Phil.
Phil: Beware your dreams, for dreams make dangerous friends. We all have them, longings for a better life, a happy marriage, world-changing work. Dreams are, I have came to believe, are missed-placed longings. False lovers, why? Because God is enough. Just God and He isn’t enough because He can make all your dreams come true. Oh, no you’ve got him confused with Santa or Merlin or Oprah. The God that created the universe is enough for us even without our dreams, without the better life, the happy marriage, the world-changing work. God was enough for the martyrs facing lions and fire, even when the cavalry didn’t show up and save the day. Even when the lions and the fire won. God is enough for you. We can’t discover the truth of that statement while we are clutching to our dreams. We have to let them go. In 2003 my dream died, and I discovered that once all the noise had faded away what I had been missing all along. The impact that God has planned for us does not occur when we are pursuing impact. It occurs when we are pursuing God.
Ray: So, Fanchon-
Fanchon: That is good stuff.
Ray: What did you take away from Phil?
Fanchon: You know what, for most of us in professional lives that we lead, we are focused on goals, and we are focused on outcomes, and you can get so wrapped up in your goals and outcomes that you forget what’s most important. It may be that God wants to do something different with your goals or your outcome and He had to strip that- Sometimes He has to strip us from certain things and take us through the desert in order for us to re-focus on what’s most important, which is Him. There can be a huge blessing probably our deepest valley if we just learn to truth Him. What Phil said really spoke to me, because you always think about I want my mission of my ministry or my work to have impact and to do something to reach people. But really the focus is our goals that God is using through us, for His work, what He wants us to do.
Ray: Well, I was just reflecting on a couple of things that he said there. He said, “Dreams make for dangerous friends.”
Fanchon: Oh, yeah.
Ray: And we can get so locked into pursuing our dreams and as Phil said, “Pursuing our impact that we fail to really pursue God.
Fanchon: So, those things become distractions.
Ray: That’s right.
Fanchon: And what does the enemy always want to do? Distract us.
Ray: Get us off track, get us off track. Well, Fanchon, we learned from Phil Vischer, as we just said, that were to pursue impact is in that relationship with God. Then that reminded me of what we heard from Dan Cathy, the CEO of Chick-fil-a, back in 2014. Let’s listen to what he has to say about the impact and then lets come back and talk about it.
Dan: And we are never going to have impact in society and coulter as business people. I think what He was saying was until we get into the rime of the second mile, and why is that? Well, the first mile is where what we do from the head. May I take your order please?, Clean restrooms, soap in the dispensers, two pickles in a Chick-Fil-A sandwich. Just what people are paying for, that’s what they expect. But if it is just tit for tat, if we just give you what you expect, you know, that’s never going to be remarkable. It’s sure not going to help accomplish our overall mission of impacting people’s lives. That’s just giving people what they expect. As business people, we got to get really, really good at measuring and having systems and processes that will at least deliver what people really expect. It’s a great exercise if you would like to take a flip-chart out or draw a line down a piece of paper. If you don’t have a flip-chart, I’ll do it here for you. But you ask yourself, “What do our customers really except from the first mile and are we consistently delivering on that?” I think that’s the very part of our spiritual heritage, to deliver on what people want us to do. But on the other side of a ledger line is the second mile. If the first mile is what we do from the head, the second mile has to be what we do from the heart. The first mile is what they have in the DVD player or online learning or whatever learning mechanism you use, but the second mile is learning to obey the warm-hearted impulses. The first mile results in a transaction. The second mile results in a relationship. Jesus was far more concerned about relationships than He was the transaction. Though we have to have the transaction perhaps to get us to the relationship.
Ray: So, Fanchon, what we heard there from Dan Cathy, from Chick-Fil-A was really the difference between relationship and Transaction. The first mile, that’s just the normal business stuff, right?
Fanchon: That’s just what’s excepted of you, basically.
Ray: The blocking, the tackling, the delivery of the product or the service. But it was that second mile, going the extra distance is where the impact comes around relationships. What thoughts do you have around that?
Fanchon: When I was listening to that I was thinking of Philippians when the Lord tells us to think whatever is pure, whatever is right, whatever is lovely and then at the end, He says, “Whatever is excellent and praiseworthy. Excellence was the cornerstone for how Jesus teaches us to pursue and do everything, with excellence. You know, and Dan Cathy, Chick-Fil-A, I mean overtime I go there I see something that I’m amazed at. It’s just the purest and commitment to do it with excellence. A believers that is how we need to show up every single day, it’s a reminder. You know, to show up with excellence, be there early, stay late, be willing to get in the trenches with people. Just love on people.
Ray: Yeah. That really was what Jesus was talking about in terms of turn the cheek, as He said out of this passage “Go the extra mile.” I was thinking about what Dan had taught us at the conference, and so I recently took a Saturday morning, and I sat in a Chick-Fil-A over in a corner-
Fanchon: Really?
Ray: For an hour, a whole hour and I actually was watching, I was watching the employees and the managers, I was watching the customers.
Fanchon: What did you see?
Ray: What I saw astonished me, because, because of the extra mile, the customers was receiving from Chick-Fil-A these were different types of customers. They were allowing each there to get in front in line of each other.
Fanchon: Smiling probably more.
Ray: I watched they were getting ketchup for each other, they were helping get each other’s drinks.
Fanchon: That’s amazing.
Ray: It was amazing to me.
Fanchon: Do onto others as you would have them do unto you.
Ray: So we saw that impact of going that extra mile, that second mile that Dan talked about. Going from transaction into relationship.
Fanchon: Perhaps in that second mile is where compassion becomes contagious.
Ray: And I’m glad you said that because one of other amazing guests that we’ve had at our conference. It was way back in 2012 when Tony Dungy talked to us about relationship.
Tony: I started thinking about coach that I had who I enjoyed, who O thought helped me that most. It wasn’t that guys that were yellers or the screamers or the guys who were so demanding. It was the coaches that helped me improve. But that was going to be a short time, and if I wasn’t helping them improve as a person, as a man, and grow, I was doing one fourth or one-fifth of my job. There is a deeper purpose. I’ve got to help these guys, not only to become better players but better man. So being there to support people but doing it in an encouraging way and a loving way. Sharing God’s way is just so critical it doesn’t take anything but the desire to help and see a situation and say, “I can make a difference.” You could think, well that’s not my job, my job is to win and I don’t want to step across the lines here. I see this going on in this player’s life, or I hear about this, but is that really my job? I see some people make that mistake and it is our job. It is our job. Boss, employee, co-worker: forget about those lines. That’s one thing about Jesus. He didn’t have those lines of social, of this is okay, this isn’t okay. I can help someone be available, don’t worry about when society says, “Oh, you shouldn’t do that.” or “Don’t talk about that at work.” or “That’s not the place.” It is always a place to help someone.
Ray: So, Fanchon, as we heard from Coach Dungy, about it’s always the right time to build a relationship and do the right thing. What comes to mind for you?
Fanchon: As I was thinking, I’ve had a chance to have conversations with the outside of that conference and then I’ve also had a chance to talk with some of the guys that he has coached. To listen to those young men talk about the impact he has had one them, what he just said is exactly what I hear from his players. “He thought me how to be a better man.” “He taught me how to be a better father.” and Tony Dungy shared this story with me at one point, he said that he use to have a family day for practice and he would let the kids of the players come in and at the beginning Peyton was kind of like “Oh, gosh.” you know, but when Peyton became a father, and he went to Denver he instituted that family day. He made sure that his kids and those children were at the practice facility at least one day a week. That was because of the seeds and the leadership of Tony Dungy, I mean it is beyond football, and that is what he lives and breaths. You can see it in the men that he has touched, in their lives, you know.
Ray: Well, one of the men that we are going to hear from is actually Casey Crawford.
Fanchon: Ah.
Ray: Casey was actually drafted by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as an NFL player and the year after Coach Dungy left Tampa to come here to Indianapolis Casey was fortunate enough to win a world championship with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Casey’s one of our speakers for the 2018 event, and we recently had a chance to interview him for the Bottom Line Faith program. An amazing story about Casey, he started a mortgage company in 2008.
Fanchon: Wow.
Ray: A mortgage company in 2008!
Fanchon: That’s when the whole collapse of the mortgage industry-
Ray: That’s right. But, he stepped into this, and he says we’re going to do something different. We’re going to be different we’re going to be a disruptor. Today they’ve got over 5,000 employees doing some amazing things.
Fanchon: That’s incredible.
Ray: We’re going to talk about a couple of clips. Let’s hear what Casey Crawford has to say about his faith in leadership.
Casey: An imperative is that you must commit to acting in the best long-term interest of another. That is an imperative to be part of this community if you are not will to commit to loving and valuing people to acting in their best long-term interest, we say you shouldn’t be part of this community period. That’s our purpose statement, that’s our collected community purpose statement for loving people. I think when you do that a lot of really good decisions lineup. So one of the things that were known for is giving people a full credit decision, underrating them before they ever start shopping for a house. We do that because we believe you should know how much you can afford before you start shopping.
Ray: There’s an idea.
Casey: A simple concept right? People said we were crazy at the time, “You can’t do that too much resource you’re wasting.” but fundamentally if my little sister was going to buy a home, the first thing I would have her do, “Give me all your documents.” let me have our credit decision maker look at all this and give you an idea of how much you should buy. Not how much you want to buy, but how much you should buy. So, said, “If I was going to do that for my little sister, why wouldn’t I do that for yours? And yours? And your brother? And anyone?”, I said, “Because we want to value people” So we went to act in their long-term best interest. So we started doing that, that has now become ten years later everyone is saying all the sudden, “You know what, we should underwrite people before they start shopping for a house.” I take no credit for that was my partner came up with those good ideas. Simple, I think, true norths like that, inform so many business processes and I think people neglect to see that. A lot of times if you really just think about what is best for your customers and your teammates it helps to make a lot of decisions straightforward and easy.
Ray So, Fanchon, don’t you just love this comment?
Fanchon: I love it.
Ray: Love means to continually act in the best interest of another, and that’s how Casey and his team have built that company.
Fanchon: It reminds me of the Scripture, I can’t remember where it is found but, “Always concerning other people’s interest as more important than your own.” and when you’re serving in business or wherever you’re serving or compacity that you’re dealing with people to really think about the person’s interests above maybe the bottom line, you getting the deal or whatever it is. But really making sure that you put that person’s best interests before. It can transform- I mean he is a prime example of how quickly God can use that type of heart.
Ray: Well, without question he is still a young man but to see the incredible success that God has allowed he and the team at Movement Mortgage to have and it is all this building of community and their culture and with that in mind I want to check out the second clip of Casey Crawford.
Casey: At that time, right? Our country is in the largest financial crisis since the Great Depression, and really the epicenter of that crisis was set around the mortgage industry and the mortgage market. We not only brought down our nation’s economy we brought down the world economy because of a lot of corruption, greed, and lack of Integrity that was so pervasive in the space. Americans have fundamentally lost faith and trust in financial services as a whole. So, I pictured God going, “What would it look like if we started a financial services company that really loved our customers?” So, then if we really gave people loans they’re going to be accretive to their family owning a home, not going to stress them out, put them in debt or foreclosure, but I actually helped them realize that the American dream of homeownership, that we know, leads to great wealth building to greater family stability, you know, but never do it inappropriately. What if you create a place where at work, an environment where people were actually coming closer to Christ, that they were really being loved. That we were going to act in their best long-term interest. Helping them to be physically fit, emotionally fit, spiritually developed and be part of something with a purpose beyond simply making a profit. So with that vision, with that enthusiasm, we set out in 2008 and said, “Man, we want to start a new kind of financial service company in the United States and change the bar. We know we aren’t going to serve every family, but we can think we can change with excellence looks like in the entire marketplace.” My partner and I started a company with four employees, and in the last ten years, we’ve grown to about 4000 employees. We’re doing one in about seventy home purchases in the US, about 600 offices and man we have just seen God move in incredible ways in the last decade it has been extremely much more than had hoped or imagined at that time.
Ray: So one of the interesting things about Casey story is much like we heard from Phil Vischer, that before the vision got really accomplished and things started happening he went through a season and a series of just being broken down before the Lord and being humbled and that is really an important part of the story.
Fanchon: I think that is way encouraging for people watching because we all go through the valleys, we all go through those hard times and trails where we are questioning God, “Am I doing the right thing? Why is this happening? What’s going on?” but just resting in the faith that God knows what He is doing. He knows what He need to teach us and look at what’s come out of that.
Ray: But he set out with that big vision, and then they implemented it in a way that-
Fanchon: Has never been done before.
Ray: There are two things I’ve learned about Movement Mortgage that were radically destruction. Number one- their algorithms in the way they do mortgages will not let someone borrow more money than they should.
Fanchon: That’s Revolution.
Ray: That’s revolutionary.
Fanchon: Depending on, you know, looking at where we where.
Ray:It had never been done before.
Fanchon: Yeah. Wow.
Ray: This one blows my mind, they actually do a mortgage through underwriting and in under seven days.
Fanchon: Now, that is incredible.
Ray: That folks that will hear from Casey at our conference they’re going to hear about what it means to be a disruptor, but it starts out with doing something that’s never been done before. That is how you disrupt something.
Fanchon: Right, yeah and doing it will with excellence.
Ray: Doing it well with excellence and compassion. We all love a success story.
Fanchon: That’s right.
Ray: An after success story, but we don’t always know what went into the breakdown and the humility to make it a success story that’s really great segue then into the next speaker that we’re going to have at our conference in 2018, is a very famous face that may be a lot of people don’t know his name, and that is actor Kevin Sorbo.
Fanchon: Oh, yes.
Ray: I remember as a young kid watching the Hercules television series, and for six years it was the number one rated show in the world.
Fanchon: I didn’t know that.
Ray: Yes, number one syndicated show in the world.
Fanchon: Wow.
Ray: When we sat down and learned from Kevin, that God brought him through, here he was a very famous actor, big strong guy, lots of muscles, but something happened, and it broke him down. Kevin has a powerful story about how God used his brokenness to bring him back into a relationship with Him, let’s listen to what happened.
Kevin: I was having problems with my left shoulder I can’t figure out what’s going on with it, and these three fingers were cold and numb all the time. I was doing all my own stunts; I’m working fourteen hours a day, lifting weights two hours a day, I was maybe averaging four, four and a half hours of sleep a night. I was doing, like I said, most of my own stunts. I kinda blow it off. My doctor back home here in Los Angles, I told him what was going on. He said, “You do a lot of stunts Kevin, you hit a nerve like hockey players do that could create the numbness down here, and that can last for months,” he said. I blow it off. I go to come back home to do my first big publicity machine for my first movie. Go back to LA my doctor finds a lump way up here in my left clavicle. He thought it was cancer, didn’t tell me that at first. He told me that afterward. He said, “We need to do a biopsy, we need to check this thing out.” I said okay, and I went to see my chiropractor who I hadn’t seen in 8 years, and I laid on this table, and I heard a voice say “Don’t let him crack your neck.” and I thought that’s so weird he has never cracked my neck like ever in eight years. He knows I don’t like the crack. The voice says it again so I’m arguing with the voice in my head and he cracked my neck. That lump ended up being an aneurysm, that had been sending blood clots into my arm for three months. That crack forced three of the clots to my brain, and I suffered three strokes, one speech, one vision, one balance. Fortunate in one way it could have killed me. I could have ended up in a wheelchair for the rest of my life. But I went from a guy who was in better shape than most athletes in their twenties, I’m in my thirties at this time, to a guy that couldn’t even stand up and walk. I spent the next four months learning how to even stand up and balance again. It was three years on the road to recovery for me. I’ve always been a Christian, but I never needed faith until this huge roadblock entered my life.
Ray: So, Fanchon as you listened to what Kevin went through, just that physical breakdown and God bringing Kevin back to himself, what are your thoughts around that?
Fanchon: You know, I think about brokenness, and I think about being brokenhearted, and I want her to a sermon that sticks with me to this day, that God uses brokenness in our life, it really is grace. Because it forces us to really decide and contemplate do I believe what I say I believe? Lord, am I going to trust you to bring me through this? And it is an opportunity for God to show His grace in our life, to bring us and to refine us. If we just stick with Him through those things like Kevin did, it’s faith. God can bring us through the other side and us it more for His glory and more to reach other people. Look at what Kevin is doing today.
Ray: It is amazing. He is one of the busiest actors in Hollywood.
Fanchon: Yes.
Ray: And God is using him. He has been in the God’s Not Dead movies, he was in Star Trek: Andromeda, he was obviously Hercules for a number of years. He has been in over fifty movies in the course of his career. And God really has used him through brokenness and now has caused him to have some of the highest worldly success-
Fanchon: And what a testimony.
Ray: What a testimony.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: And that actually brings us to another great segue, at least I believe it’s a great segue–
Fanchon: Yes.
Ray: –to David Green. Talk about a man who God has positioned with unbelievable worldly success.
Fanchon: So much favor.
Ray: The founder and CEO of Hobby Lobby.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: One of the most profitable companies, not only in America but in the world. 100% family-owned business and God is blessing it. Let’s listen to this clip about David’s story of faithfulness before he had worldly success, how God spoke to him, that eventually led to worldly success.
David: There was an event that I went to, a huge assembly where there were missionaries from all over the world were assembled there. I remember them taking up an offering for literature for these missionaries to have literature of the Gospel that they could use in their countries. I don’t know what I gave on that particular moment but by the time I was flying home on an airplane I knew that God was saying to me “You need to give $30,000,” and we were a very, very small company and I said “How in the world? We can’t give $30,000.” I knew that didn’t come from me. But we talked, and I talked to my wife, Barbara, when I said: “I think God and I know God is asking us to give $30,000, so why don’t we write four checks $7,500 a piece, four months post date them and send them in and give the $30,000.” Well what happened, I found out that those things were post dated four months after these missionaries had stayed over and were praying because they really didn’t have enough money for all of those to have the Gospel. I got a call, and the call said “You know this happened,” and I knew that God had spoken to me and so it was at that time and moment that God could use a merchant and that it was in God’s will, what I was doing.
Ray: Fanchon, isn’t that amazing?
Fanchon: I’m going to tell you what, faith in action. Faith in action.
Ray: The guy went and was like God said, “I want you to give $30,000,” and he said, “I don’t have the $30,000.” But what did he do? He gave it.
Fanchon: Yeah, you talk about BHAGGs, that’s what I think about.
Ray: Big, hairy, audacious, God-sized, goals.
Fanchon: That’s right.
Ray: That’s right. So, he acted out of faith.
Fanchon: Yeah.
Ray: In my interview with David, he over and over again pointed back to that moment of faithfulness, and he said, “Look, if we can be faithful with the little things, God is going to give us much.” Now today over 600 stores, billions of dollars of prophets they’re giving away to Kingdom enterprises all around the world.
Fanchon: And look at the example in terms of them standing in the gaps. Even when things have gotten hard for them that have stood on the truth of the Gospel and not wavered and God have blessed them and continues to use their company as an example for all of us.
Ray: That’s right. One more clip it is going to be a short one.
Fanchon: Yep.
Ray: I want folks to hear this because David was a little different than the rest of his family. The rest of his family was pastors and missionaries. Let’s listen to the short clip that David knew there was something different about his life.
David: My Junior and Senior year I took this distributive education, I worked, I was usually out of school by 11 o’clock, and I was at work at the local 5 and Dime store, so I loved going to work, and I loved the doing the displays and just seeing buying and selling merchandise. So by the age of about sixteen, I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a retailer. I know that I am called to be a retailer, and I know that God also anoints me the same that He anoints a pastor and I think He anoints all of us in whatever field He has given us. He has given me this field of retail, and I know that God anoints me in what I do, as He does all of us I think in whatever He asked us to do.
Ray: It’s that amazing?
Fanchon: It’s encouraging.
Ray: Fanchon, that he knew from a very young age, all the way back in high school that God was calling him to be different. We talk a lot about that here at Bottom Line Faith is that unique calling that God has placed on us. As you listened and heard David talk about knowing he was designed to be a retailer, what thoughts come to mind?
Fanchon: Overall, this conference, all these speakers, the underlying theme is encouragement. Encouraging us to stay in the gap and to trust the Lord in where He has us. When I think about that story, that’s what I think about. You know, a lot of us probably feel like we’re the oddball out. In so many ways working in the marketplace, but being a believer in the marketplace and really trying to be an ambassador for Christ- it is encouragement for us just to have faith in the process that God has put before us. And have faith in what He has put inside us, in terms of how He wants us to use that for His glory do affect other people for Him.
Ray: That’s right, and that really is a purpose for our annual conference. To bring high-profile people, that people want to hear from. Right, they acknowledge people have had success, but most importantly that these successful people acknowledge where their successes come from. They’re living and leading Biblically. That’s really why we host the conference. Your word with encouragement we want them to just be encouraged to live out their faith in the marketplace. So folks, come to the Truth at Work conference, check it out, Truthatwork.org/conference. Whether you’re listing to this 2018, 2019 or beyond, check out that website and you will learn about the annual conference. Fanchon, thanks for joining us in-studio today.
Fanchon: Thank you. This has been so fun. It’s been a pleasure.
Ray: It’s been a pleasure to do something not on stage, but backstage.
Fanchon: And we do hope if you’re listening that you join us at the conference. We’d love to meet you. And remember: stay in community, stay in fellowship, and always stay in faith.
Ray: There you have it, folks, on this very special episode of Bottom Line Faith, the program where we love to bridge the gap between faith and business. Until next time, I am your host, Ray Hilbert, saying God bless, and we’ll see you soon.