About:
Entrepreneur and super-mom, Heather Wilson, discusses obedience, loving the unlovable, and rooting your identity in Christ. Heather is the co-founder of Christian crowd-funding ministry, GiveSendGo.com.
Bio:
Heather Wilson is a wife, mother and the Co-founder/CMO of GiveSendGo.com Throughout Heather’s life she has found success everywhere she has placed her foot.
From founding/leading her recent startup GiveSendGo.com the worlds largest crowdfunding platform for Christians, to being a mother to 10 children (5 her own, and 5 foster) Heather has successfully navigated the many challenges of life and come out on top.
Despite any value of the accomplishments of her life, Heather believes that the most important thing she can leave behind in this world, is a legacy of a life defined not by the work she did, but by the work Jesus did through her.
Heather is passionate about people. She wants to see people grow in their walk with the Lord and live a life that is a great story of how awesome God is. Everyone has experienced fundraising to raise money for a cause, or charity. With GiveSendGo, Heather and her team introduce a platform for not just raising funds to get more money, but raising funds to share Hope in the world.
Quotes:
“Until you’re put in the position where you love somebody that is unlovable… you don’t really understand the sacrifice God made for us.”
“Do not let your identity be wrapped up in what you’re doing.”
“I am responsible for obeying God today, and God will be responsible for the outcome”
Key Takeaways:
1. The first step is the scariest.
2. We are called to be a light in a dark world wherever we are.
3. When you’re obedient, outcomes don’t matter.
4. Do your due diligence on your business partners.
5. “Humility is not a weakness.”
Full transcript:
Ray: Hello everyone this is Ray and I am your host here at Bottom Line Faith. This is the program where we love to bridge the gap between faith and leadership in the marketplace. We get the opportunity here at Bottom Line Faith to interview the most amazing followers of Christ who are living out their faith each day in the marketplace. Sometimes they’re CEOs and entrepreneurs and business owners, other times they’re athletes and celebrities and high profile personalities. But what they all have in common is they love Jesus, they’ve been through a story, they’ve had a journey and their faith continues to shape the way they live and the way they lead every day in the marketplace.
We’re just so glad that you would join us for today. Here at Bottom Line Faith and our guest is calling in from Salisbury, Maryland. Folks, I’d like you to join me in welcoming Heather to the program today. She is the co-founder at an amazing organization. We’re going to learn all about it. GiveSendGo. Heather, welcome to Bottom Line Faith.
Heather: Thank you so much. I’m so happy to be here.
Ray: Well Heather, you and I recently had a chance to get to know each other setting up today’s conversation and you have had an amazing journey to this point. Tell us a little bit about your life, your family life, and then we’ll get into the whole GiveSendGo story and model and so forth in a moment. But tell us Heather about you.
Heather: Sure. So I am actually from a very large family. I have 11 brothers and sisters and grew up in a great Christian home where a relationship with God was modeled to me daily. I then got married 20 years ago, have some kids, then my kids are all encroaching the teenage years and we find out we’re going to have a… we call her our blessing baby now, there’s other terms for her but she showed up on announced. We said, “Oh my goodness we’re going to be parents again.” We have this big gap between our youngest and our… what we thought was going to be our youngest. So we decided we might want to adopt a child maybe to fill the gap and so we said, “All right God, we’re going to be willing to start this process, to foster, to adopt maybe a seven or eight year old. Here’s our plans God, we’re going to tell you how we want it.”
So we went through the process and the day we got approved, we get a phone call that said, “We have five siblings that have been removed from their home, do to severe abuse, is there any way you could take all five?” I looked at my husband and then said to God, “I said I wanted to fill the gap but I didn’t mean I wanted to fill the gap.” As they were ages 10, nine, eight, six and five. So they really filled between my 13 year old and my four year old.
I said, okay, I think I need to be a little more specific when I’m talking to God. I think what God does is he sees a willing heart and says, “You know what, I’m going to use this to teach you some things and really not only change these kids’ lives, but change your own life.”
Ray: Well, Heather, for those who are following along at home, let’s help them with the math. So what we’re talking about here is, you and your husband have five of your natural born children and you have five foster children. Is that correct?
Heather: Yes. So we have a very loud, busy household that just never ends. It’s actually surprising that I can find a place that’s so quiet to have this phone call. I’m out in the car.
Ray: Yeah. If at any moment we start hearing, mom, mom, mom, mom, we’ll know that this is just another day in the life of Heather. So you grew up in a family with a lot of children, you and your husband raising many children. We’re going to get to the GiveSendGo story in just a moment, but what has God taught you and your husband in the course of your journey, your own biological children and these foster children? You mentioned a moment ago, God’s always looking for the willing heart. But what’s God taught you and your husband in this journey?
Heather: We looked at each other probably like a few months ago, and this has been the hardest year of our life. If I’m going to be completely honest with you and the listeners, has been really the hardest year of our lives, our lives, our family lives. We looked at each other in the midst of all the craziness, and my husband said to me, “I think that God brought these kids to show us something, to change our hearts.” Because, until you’re put in a position where you love somebody that is unlovable, that you have to daily sacrifice for someone who’s not appreciative of what, because they don’t know how to be, until you are sacrificing without expecting anything in return, you don’t really understand the sacrifice that God made for us.
It’s been so eyeopening, because I’ve lived a Christian life, I’ve served my whole life in children’s ministry and in the church and I’ve always been someone who was a giver and a server, but this last year has been taking sacrifice. What sacrifices is to a whole another level. It’s not just showing up on a Sunday morning and serving for an hour and going home and saying, “God, you have my life, and please rub off these rough edges.” Because you start noticing a lot more rough edges when you’re put in situations that are difficult.
Ray: That is so powerful. My wife and I, parents of three, mostly great teenagers and those listening with teens, understand what I mean by that. There are just really tough days when you love your kids, but sometimes they don’t like you and sometimes you don’t like them, at least the behaviors. But I just wrote this down that, until you really learn to love someone who is unlovable, until you really get to that point, that’s when you first can begin to understand God’s unconditional love for us. Because we are unlovable, we are broken, messed up folks. I really appreciate that and that’s a great takeaway for me. I’m glad you shared that. Thank you for your transparency.
What I’d love to do now is I would really love to jump in and now start to learn about GiveSendGo. Very interesting name. Why don’t you just first of all, tell us what it is that the organization does and then we’ll get into the backstory of how it came about and how you’re helping organizations today and moving forward. But tell us about GiveSendGo?
Heather: Sure. GiveSendGo go is a free Christian crowdfunding sites. So you may have seen on your social media feeds campaigns that your friends are raising money for, maybe they’re going on a missions trip or they’re raising money for medical bills or some memorial, and they’re asking you to donate to some cause that they’re doing, such as GoFundMe or Kickstart and some of those are crowdfunding sites. We had noticed that there really wasn’t a Christian version and we thought, Christians should be the ones doing this, joining together, everybody giving, because we can be so much more powerful and do so much more when we work together, than we can even do by ourselves.
So we started GiveSendGo, me and a couple of siblings and you can take a look at it at givesendgo.com. It really is a place where people can go and raise money for whatever God’s called them to be and do. Again, you know people go, “Oh, is it just for missions trips?” No, it’s not just for missions trips. If God’s called you on a missions trip, well then by all means raise money for mission trip. If God’s called you to adoption, to adopt a child, use GiveSendGo to adopt. If God’s called you to help your single mother neighbor whose car broke down and you want to start a campaign to help raise money to help her get reliable transportation, use GiveSendGo to start a campaign to get people to rally around different causes and needs, with the hope to share the good news of Jesus.
Crowdfunding sites are out there to raise money and GiveSendGo we say, we raise money to share hope. Money is just temporary, but hope is eternal. But a lot of times when somebody needs money, that’s all they can see and until you can meet the physical needs, they’re not going to be open all the time to that spiritual needs that they have. So we like to use GiveSendGo to say, “Listen, meet people’s physical needs to be able to show them the everlasting hope that can meet their spiritual need.”
Ray: Well, I love this and I think if memory serves me right from our previous conversation, I think you indicated this may be the largest or most prominent Christian crowdfunding platform around, is that correct?
Heather: It is, yeah. We are the largest free Christian crowdfunding site in the world. We have campaigns, I believe almost every country, our processors will process money in 25 countries, I believe right now, and they’re constantly adding more, so then we allow more as soon as they add more. A cool thing on our homepage, if you go to givesendgo.com and scroll down a little bit, you’ll see a picture of a map. On that map, it’s filling up with flames because every time someone starts a campaign, they put a flame on that map that says, “I’m shining brightly here. This is where I’m going to make a difference.” The map, it’s really cool if you go and look and you can zoom right in and you can click on it and say, “I want to see the missions that are going on in this location.” Take a look at that sometime because it’s really awesome to see they’re people all over world.
Because that’s really as Christians what we should be doing. We should be lighting up the world. We should be sharing hope wherever we are.
Ray: Oh, I love that. Okay, so one of the things I love to do when I get a chance to interview someone like yourself who has started something, I want you to take us back to, was there a particular moment, a particular incident or something that happened? Where did this idea first strike you, like there’s got to be a better way, or what if we could? Walk us through that. The very first thoughts, the very first time when this concept was birthed.
Heather: Sure. Some of my siblings were sitting around a dining room table talking about what would it look like if the church operated like it did back when we read Acts, the church and Acts, where everybody gave to each other and where it’s taken care of. What would that look like in today’s society? It’s hard to even imagine what that would look like in today’s society, with churches on every corner of the street, not even being able to talk to each other because of differences. So what would that look like if the church actually came together and work together to make a difference?
Ideas started flying. All of my siblings are very creative. They love Jesus. We just started brainstorming I guess. The idea of crowdfunding came up and it had been fairly new. We started to see it become more prevalent on social media and we thought, you know what? I wonder if there is a crowdfunding site for Christians that allows Christians to work together, to go into all the world to preach the gospel and share the hope we have. We didn’t really see anything that was thriving and we said, you know what, we’re going to just take this leap and see what we can do.
Ray: So what were some of the early obstacles? What were some of the things that you had to work through to even get this project from conception to some phase of reality or launch? Walk us through that process.
Heather: I think that’s probably one of the hardest things about starting a business, is going from the idea to the actual conception of an idea. Because, everybody has ideas all the time. You know how many inventions that I’ve had that I was like, “Oh this, this would be a great invention, we should do that.” They just are words in the air and nothing ever happens. So to go from having an idea and saying, you know what? We really feel like this is something we should do. That first step of deciding that is always the most scary, because you’re going, “Okay, I’m going to take a step of faith believing that this is an idea that God gave us and we’re going to move forward with it.” It’s unknown. This is an unknown territory for us.
I was actually working at a marketing company at the time and so we had approached different companies to build a website because we knew that what we had to do first, and we ended up settling with the company that I was working for at the time to build GiveSendGo. I’m there every day. I can help be a part of just like the everyday building of it. Then what happened is that over… they said it would take three to four months and then five months came and then eight months came and then 10 months came and we’re going, “Okay, this is not happening the way we had planned it to. We were supposed to launch six months ago and okay God, should we even be doing this?”
Right from the beginning you start getting these questions and doubts, the minute you start hitting these obstacles, and I think what God did in our lives is say, “Listen, I’m not going to just make this all easy. This is going to be a learning process for you as well. This is not just about having GiveSendGo a great Christian platform to raise money on, this is about developing you into the person I want you to be.” I looked at it the same as with like the foster kids, I could say this is all about these kids that I’m taking care of, but it’s not, all of these things I’m noticing more and more that God’s plan around it is not really about the website or about these kids, it’s about who God wants me to become in this process.
This first year of developing this website was very, very stressful. Lots of bumps in the road, but we finally made it and all of a sudden a year had passed, the whole year and we said, “Okay, let’s launch this thing.” We went live and at the same time we went live, some bakers in California, their campaign got taken down from GoFundMe because they wouldn’t bake for a homosexual couple or something like that. Everybody was up in arms about GoFundMe. The Christian communities said, “I don’t want to use GoFundMe if they’re going to discriminate against Christians.” You can have a campaign about anything on GoFundMe, but they’re not going to let these people have a campaign, that’s ridiculous.
We launched within two weeks of that. I was like, “Okay God, you did have a plan.” I don’t know why I am constantly surprised. I feel like the Israelite wandering in the wilderness so many times and I read that story and get on their case, like how can not trust God? Then I look at my story and go, “Oh yeah, okay God, teach me. Teach me to remember that you’re faithful.”
Ray: Amazing. Sometimes it’s just we got to be patient, wait on God’s timing. One of the things we talk a lot about is that any new venture is probably going to take about twice as long to get started as we planned and probably take about twice as much money to get started as we planned. It sounds like that’s pretty much was your experience. Does that sound about right?
Heather: That is exactly. You think you have a great idea or you know you have a great idea and you’d think the minute you bring it to market, it’s just going to explode-
Ray: Yeah and everybody is going to jump over it.
Heather: … because how could it not? This is the best idea. Then you start realizing the amount of work it’s going to take and the amount of time it’s going to take and then you have to reign it back in a little bit and say, “All right, wait. It’s a step by step process. Learning the business, learning the ups and downs and ins and outs of this, it’s a journey, it’s not just an explosion.”
Ray: So whether it’s in general, just kind of overarching in your life or even specifically through this journey in this process of getting, GiveSendGo off the ground. Is there a particular verse or a particular promise or principle in God’s word that you’ve just held onto that has just been that constant rock for you? Is anything come to mind?
Heather: Well, actually it’s funny because my life verse since I was a little kid, has always been Hebrews 13:5b, because I learned it as a kid in Sunday school and Hebrews 13:5b says, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” I clung to that during different times in my journey where things were hard and scary, I would remember Hebrews 13:5b said, “I will never leave you or forsake you.” I took that as a promise that God has made to me. Then one day I was like, “I learned it as a kid, as half the verse, I wonder what the whole verse says?” I went back and it said, and I thought it was really funny, especially having started GiveSendGo, “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God says, ‘I won’t leave you or forsake you.”
I thought, wow, keep yourself free from the love of money. That’s exactly what GiveSendGo is about. Yes, you’re raising money, but it’s not about the money, it’s about the promise that God will never leave or forsake us.
Ray: I love that, Hebrews 13:5b. What I’d like you to do, Heather, let’s pause for a moment and let’s say that there’s somebody listening to the program right now, who maybe they’ve had that idea that God has placed in their spirit, or maybe they’re working toward a product launch or starting a new business or a new idea, a new concept, but it just doesn’t seem to be taking off. Maybe they’re frustrated, maybe they’re discouraged, disappointed, what have you. What encouragement or advice would you have for someone who’s listening to this conversation? They’re resonating with the difficulty that you went through to get this whole God centered project off the ground. They’re resonating with your story and yet they’re still discouraged. What encouragement could you offer?
Heather: I had just actually led a women’s retreat at my church this past year and we talked about being seated with Christ and knowing where your seat is, that when you become a Christian, when you have a relationship with Jesus, it says, we’ve been seated with Jesus who is on the right hand of the Father and so we’ve been seated with Christ. So often we get so wrapped up in what we’re doing to form our identity that we can forget that really our identity lies with where we’re seated. We want to be seated at the skinny table or the successful business person table or the popular table, but we need to remember that we have the best seat of all.
So as you’re going through and there’s these difficulties and you feel frustrated and you can sometimes… and I know this feeling, you can feel like your whole worth is wrapped up in your business. Whether this fails or succeeds, it’s going to tell who you are and you just need to remember that you have been seated with Christ. Your identity does not depend on whether you fail or succeed at this business and not just say you don’t put everything into it and you don’t beat it in prayer and you don’t surround yourself with godly counsel and all of those things that we should be doing, but do not let your identity be wrapped up in what you’re doing. Let your identity wrapped up in who you are.
Ray: That is so good and so powerful. Right along those lines you can always determine that we’re walking in obedience just because there’s fruit and blessing and just as we also can’t assume we’re walking in disobedience because there’s hardship and difficulty. That’s where the identity piece is so important that we’re not focusing on the results under the circumstances rather, but it’s more about the process of our identity in Christ. That’s what my take away is.
I don’t know how close you are just on the day to day of the stories and all the campaigns that you’ve got going on there on the platform, but would you maybe share one example or one story that really captured your heart and really set in motion and said, “That’s why we launched GiveSendGo, we are on mission, we are on track.” Could you just give us an example of a campaign or a story that really captured your heart that just really blessed you, that you were able to provide the platform for it?
Heather: There are just so, so many. Every day we’re reading through campaigns, but a couple of years ago there was a house fire in Pennsylvania where the mom and two of the kids did not make it out of the house and the dad and one or two of the kids did and were in the hospital for a long time. The community around them, that church community rallied around this devastating situation. I read these stories and I go, “Oh, this is heartbreaking.” I know I can’t change the situation, but to know that we can provide hope and that this community raised over $100,000 to provide hope and help for this family during what’s going to be… We have hard times in life, we can’t get away from it, it’s actually promised to us, in this world, you will have trouble.
There are going to be troubles. But to see campaigns over and over again. I remember during the election process I was like, “Oh my goodness, I just don’t even know.” You listen to the news and you can’t even make a decision. Everybody’s bad, there’s just no good choices, I don’t even know what to do. I felt very overwhelmed and then I was scrolling through GiveSendGo one day and I really felt like God pressed upon me that, “Look, you don’t have to worry about what the government’s doing, I am doing works through individuals following me all around the world. I am still moving. I am still moving on people who are choosing to follow me.”
It was like a burden lifting off of me, as I had to make my decisions and things like that and the political, because we live in America, where we have a voice, but I was able to go, you know what? There are people making a difference. That’s what God calls us to do. He calls us to make a difference, right where we are, no matter what the political culture is around us, no matter what anything else is going on, we are called to be like in a dark world, right where we are. Every time I look at GiveSendGo, I say, “Thank you God for using that person I’m looking right now. Thank you for using Hanna and thank you for using Heather to adopt this family and thank you for Jeff and his family.” It’s so exciting to see that God is still using people to accomplish his mission.
Ray: Well, I’ve got to tell you what’s going on in my mind right now as I’m listening. I have a good friend of mine and I love this, because he regularly says that every day he’s got to preach the gospel to himself. He needs to be reminded of the gospel. So he preaches the gospel to himself. As you’re reading those names and seeing those campaigns, it feels to me like a big part of this story is about God speaking to you as a reminder that he is at work through his people and you get to see that every day, when it’s so easy in this world to get discouraged. That’s what was in my mind as I was listening to what you were just saying.
Heather: That’s exactly it. It’s just reminding ourselves who God is and that he’s faithful and he’s not silent. He’s not silent.
Ray: Yeah. Now there’s something very different about GiveSendGo versus the other crowdfunding source platforms. In addition to that, this is for the Christian community. You charge no fees for these campaigns. Did I understand that correctly?
Heather: That is correct. So when we first started, we actually took some of the bigger platforms and saw how they were working and said, we’re going to just do a slightly lower fee to use our platform. So we came up with a system where we were, a half a percent lower than the big names and thought this is where we’re going to go. Then probably two months in as we are encouraging people to start campaigns on GiveSendGo and then when God wants someone to do something, he will provide for it. We started to feel very convicted ourselves, and we said, you know what? If this is God’s platform, then we’re not going to charge a fee to use it, we’re going to believe that people can donate to us if they feel led, if they have the extra money that they want to donate to us, but we’re not going to have a mandatory fee.
Now there is a processing fee just because if you process money online at any time there is going to be a processing fee. It’s not us, we have an outside processor that the money goes through and they process the credit card. But we said, we are not going to add a fee on for using our platform, which a lot of other platforms did at the time. Now since they’ve started changing a little bit, after we decided to go free within the next couple of years, we saw their platforms trying it out and we knew they were trying it out as a marketing ploy, where for us, when we decided to go free, we were doing it out of obedience.
We were saying, “God we’re going to put our trust in you and we believe that you say that we should be offering this for free so that people who need to raise the money can get as much of the money as possible.” So that is why we chose to offer GiveSendGo for free.
Ray: That is so powerful and I’m so grateful that you shared that. What I want our audience to really take away, if someone’s listening to this and they’re leading a business, leading a company or whatever, I don’t want you to get hung up around what you should charge or whether it should be free or charged or any of those things. What I want us to take away from that part of this conversation with Heather is that, if it’s God’s initiative, if it’s God’s idea and he wants it in this world, if he wants it in the marketplace, if he wants that product, if he wants that service, if he wants your company and what you have to be offered, it’s going to be him and his responsibility to make that to happen. Our job is to be obedient.
Heather, you just walked us through, it was about obedience and that at the end of the day is all that God is really asking of us, is for us to love him. As Jesus said, “If you love me, you will obey me.” That’s what it was like for you, and that’s the message I think that you have for our listeners is, would you agree with that?
Heather: I would agree. I do believe you could be spending your whole life trying to build something and as long as you’re being obedient to God, it doesn’t matter the outcome. That’s how I look at these foster kids that I have, and this is a hard thing, I want to control everything, I want to control that they are going to be awesome human beings and I can’t do that. I can’t control what’s happening to them next week because of the system. I am responsible for obeying God today and God will be responsible for the outcome. You know when you do that, it actually gets a little freeing, because you go, “Okay, I can be freed up a little bit because it’s not my responsibility. I don’t have to carry this. I don’t have to carry the weight of whether GiveSendGo is going to flourish or fade away, because I’m just listening to what God’s telling me and if I’m doing that then the right thing will happen.”
Ray: Heather, in full disclosure, I want to share with you, this is the essence of why I wanted to bring you on this program. You and I had a chance to talk, get to know each other a few weeks ago. I was so impacted and so encouraged not because you were coming in with any greatest, biggest, grandest idea, concept, even platform, but it just struck me whether it was bringing in these additional children into your home, launching this platform. The message that you have for our audience and the message that you’re reminding us of, is obedience and God will provide and he will provide through his people, in his timing, in his way. That is one of the most powerful messages that we could possibly offer to our audience here on Bottom Line Faith. That’s why I wanted to have you here and I’m just so grateful that you’re sharing this part of the story with us. So thank you for that, it’s awesome.
Heather: Well, I’m just so thankful to be on here and being able to share a little bit of our venture and my heart behind it.
Ray: Well I would love it if our audience would check this out. All of us have causes that God’s placed in our heart, family, friends, loved ones, missions, provision of food, resources, cancer, whatever. We all have some issues and causes in our life. So Heather, one more time. What is the website that folks can go and learn all about this?
Heather: It is three words put into one, so give, G-I-V-E, send, S-E-N-D and go. Because we as believers, we are givers, senders and goers, that is what we’re called to do. So it’s givesendgo.com. You can always email us at, info@givesendgo.com, with any questions that you may have.
Ray: Oh, that’s fantastic. This last section, two or three questions I want to ask is, I want to ask you to put on your Sage hat or your advisor and I’d like you to offer some experience and some advice to those who are listening. The first piece of advice is, I’d like you to go back to when you first launched this platform, GiveSendGo, and I want you to say, if you had to live this all over again, what advice would you have for yourself and your team in terms of what would you do differently if given a second chance to launch GiveSendGo? What would you do different? What’s that advice?
Heather: I’ve touched on many different things. One of the things we launched GiveSendGo with some siblings and I’m very close with all of my siblings. But just a heads up for anybody that is going into business, do your due diligence. Usually if you’re going into business with somebody outside your family, you’re going to really check up on it and see if there’s somebody you can work with. With your siblings a lot of times you just assume, “Oh, we like each other, we’re close, this’ll be great.” It’s so adds a lot of stress to your relationship. Then we’ve navigated a lot of things with sibling relationships and we’re all doing great and we all love each other and we all see each other and talk, but it has been very stressful sometimes on sibling relationship.
One thing that I would say, if you are getting partners, do your due diligence, how do you work with that person? How do they respond to different types of stress? What are their capabilities versus your capabilities? So that would be something that I would go into it a little more aware, that I just never had thought about because I love my siblings and get along with them. I never really thought about working on a project that has a lot of stress involved with it. So partnership I’d be very cautious about that.
Then also just really understand that humility is not a weakness. A lot of times I think as we start businesses, especially if you have an entrepreneurial spirit that you’re like a go getter and yeah, you can go out and do change the world and then you have all these ideas. We have to understand that humility just shows that we have value in people. As a business owner that we need to be showing humility and it’s not a weakness. It’s something that I have to think about all the time as I deal with people that either rubbed me the wrong way or that I feel like I have to be forceful to get anything done. There is still a way to remain humble and to realize the value that each person that I’m going to come in contact with has in God’s eyes.
Ray: Great counsel just around humility, that’s not a weakness. I wrote that down, I think that’s fantastic and whether it’s family or friends or just new folks that we’re getting to know in the market was, really do your due diligence in terms of who you’re going to go into business with. That is really, really good counsel for all of us as business leaders. So great stuff Heather.
I’m just so grateful for this time and what you’re doing for the Kingdom through the platform is amazing. The last question, Heather, that we ask every one of our guests here at Bottom Line Faith, is based out of Proverbs, chapter four verse 23, and these are the words of Solomon who says, “Above all else, guard your heart for it determines the course of your life.” So Heather, as we close out in this last piece of advice, I’d love it if you would fill in the blank if you have a chance to pass along the above all else advice, that one thing that you want to pass along to our audience today. Finish a phrase for us above all else…
Heather: Above all else, know your identity. Do not let it be wrapped up in what you do. Know that you belong to Jesus and he loves you more than any body else could ever love you. You see, we can’t even fathom how deep and wide his love is for us. When we can start resting in our identity in Jesus, all of these other things that come into our lives take a little backseat because we know they don’t define us, they don’t change who we are because we are loved by God.
Above all else, just know who you’re seated with, that you have been invited to the table to be seated next to Jesus. To me that is the most exciting news of all. It frees me up and many years of my life to know, I don’t have to just wrestle for other tables, I can know where I’m seated. It’s a hard struggle. I’m not going to say it’s like a daily, “Oh, I’m seated.” Sometimes I want to stand up and still go to that clean house table and feel like I’m doing the best thing. You know the clean mom house table, whatever. Sometimes you want to be seated at these other tables to get recognition, but when you know where you’re seated, you can then be free.
Ray: That is beautiful. Above all else, know your identity and who you belong to. Heather, co-founder of givesendgo.com, the number one free Christian crowdfunding site on the internet today. I just want to thank you for your obedience. I want to thank you for the vision and responding to the vision that God’s placed on your heart and I really just thank you for your great words of encouragement and advice and wisdom today. Heather, thank you for our guest here at Bottom Line Faith.
Heather: Well, thank you so much for having me.
Ray: Well folks, there you have it. Another amazing conversation with a leader that God has raised up who is making a difference on the global stage. Again, check out the site, givesendgo.com, it’s the place you can go to launch and, or support a campaign to help others who are in times of need or crisis. Or maybe sending missionaries around the globe or Bibles or there’s just endless possibilities at this amazing platform.
Thanks for joining us here at Bottom Line Faith. I want to encourage you that if you’re not a regular listener, please, please just subscribe to the program. We have new conversations and new interviews coming out every week. Until next time, I am your host here at Bottom Line Faith, Ray. I’m encouraging you to live out your faith in the marketplace every day. God bless and we’ll see you next time.