The Prayer Powered Entrepreneur: 31 Days to Building Your Business with Less Stress and More Joy

By Kim Avery and Dan Miller

“A practical and powerful resource for any business owner who desires to do business led and empowered by God.”—Shae Bynes, author of The Kingdom Driven Entrepreneur’s Guide
 
While Christian entrepreneurs start their days with prayer, the hustle and bustle of running their own businesses quickly takes focus away from their vital partnership with the almighty God. As a result, prayers for business are often broad, unfocused, and strictly tied to the entrepreneur’s vision of ideal results. The Prayer Powered Entrepreneur model walks entrepreneurs through 31 days of recognizing God as CEO through an inside-out system of praying for transformation:

• In themselves
• Their relationship with God
• Their relationship with others
• Their relationship with their business
• Culminating in praying for the impact they want their business to have in the world.

 
Kim Avery encourages entrepreneurs to keep God at the center of everything, praying in alignment with the things He has already promised, and anticipating His daily activity in their lives. During this month-long journey, business owners learn how to build a better business, live a better life, and make a bigger impact—all through the simple practice of inside-out prayer.
 
“Kim Avery gives everyone who is called into such an entrepreneurial challenge a wealth of wisdom and an easy-to-implement practical tool to keep one going. Don’t miss out on The Prayer Powered Entrepreneur! One does not have to face this challenge alone.”—Bob Allums, director of A Praying Life Seminars from seeJesus Ministries, seeJesus.net
 
“A gold mine of inspiration, encouragement, and next steps toward a deeper relationship with God.”—Marnie Swedberg, international leadership mentor & conference speaker

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Dec 31, 2019
• ISBN: 9781642796049

Book preview

A Reason for Prayer

Discouraged and overwhelmed, all I could do was sit. Well, sit and think. It was the Christmas season and, while others were trimming the tree and stuffing the turkey, I had the flu.

Unable to do much of anything, I lay on the coach and stared at the Christmas lights, reflecting on the year that had just passed.

I’ll be honest with you. I didn’t like what I was thinking.

Looking back, I’d describe my coaching business as fine, neither hot nor cold, just fine. My client’s businesses were also fine, growing at the expected pace. The businesses of other entrepreneurs I knew, well, they ranged from an occasional shining star to abysmal and bankrupt.

As I was slowing down for the first time in a long time, it suddenly occurred to me there wasn’t much about any of our businesses that set us apart, that revealed our business partner as the almighty, all-powerful, all-knowing God. We were all just . . . fine.

Where Was God?

As a business coach, I had been supporting my clients for over ten years through coaching, training, teaching, and providing timely resources.

Of course, as a Christian, I also regularly prayed for my clients—but only in a broad, vague, distant-future kind of way.

Lord, please help Bill get a client. Soon.

Father, Nancy needs things to improve.

Dear Jesus, bless me and my clients today.

All too often, the day, the quarter, the year would end, and there would be no clear connection between what I’d prayed and the results that had—or hadn’t—come. It was all very predictable and natural. It was business as usual on the planet earth.

No outsider would have guessed that my business partner was the King.

But he was. I was working for and with the Ruler of the Universe, and surely this God who hung the stars, split the sea, and dreamed up the duck-billed platypus wasn’t finding building a thriving business too daunting or too hard.

But it felt hard to me.

So, what was going on?

Business Is Hard

I’ll be the first to admit that this entrepreneurial road is tough. If Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It (HarperCollins, 2009), is right that 80 percent of businesses fail in the first five years, then that means climbers of Mount Everest have a higher success rate than entrepreneurs.¹

I understand why. There are a lot of factors that go into building a successful business. To succeed, we need to paint a compelling vision for our businesses, choose a lucrative niche, make hundreds or even thousands of new connections, communicate our benefits with incredible clarity, persevere through slow times, be patient with difficult people, build websites, pay our taxes, and still get a good night’s sleep.

It’s harder than hard.

Even with that, shouldn’t being in partnership with God—who has a perfect plan, willingly shares needed wisdom, knows all the people we need to know, and owns all the resources in the world—make a difference?

Indeed, it should. And it does for some people—people like those who share their stories in this book. Unfortunately, for the large majority of believing entrepreneurs, it doesn’t make any difference at all.

That needs to change.

Thankfully, since that Christmas season, lying on the couch with the flu, it has. God has shown me and thousands of others that when entrepreneurs choose daily to truly partner with the almighty God, their businesses do reflect and resemble him. The results are truly stunning.

Stunning Results

So, here’s the good news. Business really can be simpler. You, as an entrepreneur, can have more joy, greater peace, and less stress.

You can watch God miraculously open doors that seemed permanently closed. You can experience God connecting you with people you had no way to reach. You can receive wisdom, creativity, and ideas for which you never thought you had the capacity. Your message really can influence more people, provoke deeper transformation, and make a greater impact than you ever dreamed possible.

This all happens for you—and me—as we more consciously and consistently work hand-in-hand with our limitless God.

This book—this 31-day strategic prayer challenge—is your invitation to become a better entrepreneur, running a better business, in a better way.

Before you accept your invitation, I want to warn you that God’s invitations often come in difficult disguises.

My Most Memorable Invitation

God’s most memorable invitation to me to better partner with him came on a very ordinary, unremarkable day. It was a hot, humid New Orleans Friday. I was taking my daughter and some of her friends on an educational field trip: a classical musical, followed by a completely non-educational lunch replete with singing mice and skee-ball at the local Chuck E. Cheese’s.

That’s when it started: a stabbing pain behind my left eye.

It began small, but as the mice kept singing, the pain—and a horrible, nauseating feeling that had nothing to do with the pizza—kept growing. I could see that this, whatever this was, wasn’t going away. I grabbed the kids and began a mad rush for home before it did me in.

I didn’t make it.

Halfway there, I stopped the car, stumbled to the side of the road, and lost my cheese pizza to a chorus of Go, party girl! from some truckers driving by.

If they only knew how bad my head hurt, that the birds’ chirping was like a jackhammer in my brain, or that the dappled sunlight pleasantly peeking through the clouds was a laser beam burning through my eyes. And the nausea. Well, let’s just say the truckers couldn’t have been more wrong. If that’s what being a party girl felt like, I was never going to be one.

That day began a decades-long journey into my incurable, unexplainable, and seemingly untreatable migraines—migraines that stole my health and interrupted my dreams. Headaches that were an unwelcome intruder in the midst of my busy life. Because, as anyone who knows me well will tell you, I don’t do pain. Sure, I feel it, but I push through. I’m one of those nothing can slow me down types of people.

So, the worse my head hurt, the more determined I became. With sheer willpower, I pushed through each migraine’s crippling nausea and head-splitting throbs. I would go to work anyway. Do more. Show up. Be productive.

The more I pushed, the more it hurt, until my bed would claim me once again. I might not have been someone who does pain, but this pain and nausea had different plans.

In the brief interludes between migraines, I took denial to heights it had never been to before. I told people I felt fine. No doubt, trying to convince them—and myself—that, this time, the migraines were gone for good. But nothing had really changed. I believed in my own belief and waited and prayed for a healing that didn’t come.

When my determination and denial would inevitably fail again, the pain would cripple me, and I’d bottom out and fall into despair: God must never intend to help me. He must not have any more use for me. I’ll just give up and give in and decide to never hope again.

Until I did . . . and then the cycle would begin again.

Each day, each week, each year, the migraines would beat me down, and I became weaker and more helpless until, finally, I spent most of a two-year stretch in bed.

Tired of paying for doctors and medications that only seemed to make things worse, my insurance company finally agreed to send me away to a headache clinic so that I could stop trying to eliminate the migraines and just learn to manage the pain.

Day One at the clinic began with a very comprehensive initial intake, and I remember the doctor asking me what I did when my head started to hurt.

Meeting his gaze with pride, I recounted all the times I’d pushed through, soldiered on, ignored the agony, and bulldozed my way through the day.

The doctor was thoroughly and completely unimpressed. In fact, the more I tried to convince him how much of a warrior I was, the more he shook his head.

Then he said something that turned all my coping mechanisms upside down. Kim, your pain is talking to you, telling you to slow down, to rest, to listen, to relax. Your body is telling you to do something different, but you are not listening. You’ve been doing it all wrong.

In that one moment, he exposed how flawed my cycle of determination, denial, and despair had truly become.

That’s when I realized my migraines, which had felt like an unwelcome interruption in my otherwise happy life, were a disguised invitation from God to do life in a different way. They were God telling me to stop my endless self-sourcing and instead depend completely on him.

Slowly, I became aware of God’s faithful companionship in my loneliness and isolation. He gave me strength to endure each minute of unrelenting pain. He was my hope in the dark and my wisdom for each day. God brought joy to a journey, even in the two-year timeframe during which I rarely left my bed.

Counterintuitively, the smaller my world shrank, the more God’s love and joy filled my heart until, in the darkest of times, he became everything to me. In the midst of all that pain, lack of purpose, and diminished productivity, I became happier than I’d ever been.

Those migraines—that season—was the invitation from God that I really wanted (and needed) but almost missed because it came wrapped in a difficult disguise.

The Lesson I Didn’t Learn

In the beauty of brokenness, I experienced a God who was with me in every moment of every day. One who was the only source of joy, no matter the outward circumstance, inconvenience, or pain. A Savior who was willing and able to bridge any and every gap I faced.

I knew I would never forget the life-altering lessons I’d just learned.

Except I did.

Because unfortunately, when, by God’s grace, the migraines diminished and it was time to move ahead, I didn’t see the connection between my new business world and the experience I’d just been