Proverbs Experiment: Day Nineteen

Proverbs Chapter Nineteen:

Zeal without knowledge is not good; a person who moves too quickly may go the wrong way. (vs. 2)

This verse totally hits me where I'm at right now.

I have an incredible zeal to want to do something in the area of human trafficking. I feel like God is telling me to do something. For awhile I was thinking that His plan was for me to join an already-started organization. However, there is really nothing in Ohio that I can find where someone is doing something about human trafficking. So now I feel like His plan is for me to start something up. I don't think he wants me to move somewhere else; otherwise, wouldn't it have been easier for my house to sell? Or am I just looking into this too much?

So now I have this idea that he wants me to start a non-profit organization. But that's all I have so far. What is the mission of this organization? Is my goal to partner with already-started organizations? Who is my "target audience?" What am I trying to accomplish? Am I supposed to focus on human trafficking within this state? Within this country? In other countries? (I'm assuming that Cambodia is somewhere in the equation, since that's been one of the God-echoes I've been receiving for the last several months.) Is this supposed to be a hobby? Or is this an actual career change, one where I can earn a living?

That's why this is a good verse for me to read. I need to know more about starting up an organization. Which brings me to another God-thing. When I was in Colorado, I had the opportunity to reconnect with a cousin, someone I hadn't seen in almost twenty years. She and her family invited me over to their house for dinner before I left Colorado, and I was telling her about this passion God had given me. She told me that a couple of years back, she had this idea for a different "social entrepreneur" type of business, but she never really got around to starting it up or even really researching it. However, she did buy a program that would probably help me set something up. She gave it to me, and I looked at it today. It really does help you set everything up and give you a lot of information about being a social entrepreneur.

(Which begs the question: could one of the main reasons for me going back to Colorado for such a short time is so that I could reconnect with my cousin, who found me online after years of searching and somehow found me in the year I was back, and so that I could get this program from her, which will help me setup something I'm extremely passionate about? Interesting.)

I have the zeal, but I want to do it the right way. I need the knowledge. I also need to continue to pray that God would continue to guide me on this path - especially after all those verses in previous chapters of Proverbs about allowing God to direct our ways, not ourselves.

If you help the poor, you are lending to the Lord - and he will repay you! (vs. 17)

Reminds me of Matthew 25, where we find out that when we help the sick, the hungry, those who are in prison - we are really helping Jesus. When we are serving others, we are serving Jesus and to me this is the highest act of worship we can give.

Discipline your children while there is hope. If you don't, you will ruin their lives. (vs. 18)

I've obviously heard this verse before, and every time I go into a store and a kid is throwing a temper tantrum because he isn't getting his way; or when I'm in a restaurant, and a child is embarrassing themselves by screaming or causing a scene; or when I'm at a park with my daughter, and another kid comes up and pushes her off the slide or something else - and yet the parents of those misbehaving children just smile and give me that "Aw shucks, kids will be kids" look - I think of the consequences of their stupidity.

Obviously we need to be kind in our discipline of our kids, and we need to find ways of discipline that work with them (for me, it was the belt; if my parents would have given me "time out" for my discipline, I would have loved being in my room by myself, thank you.) - but too many parents these days let their kids get away with so much, and then - just as the verse says - later on in life, their children haven't learned any boundaries and they amazingly become worse terrors, just in different ways.