Christian health and wealth ministries claim that if you give your money to God, you will be blessed with financial wealth and physical health. Conveniently, the ministries are well-organized to collect your tax-deductible contributions on God’s behalf!

 

The title A Richer Life has the sound of that racket’s appeal. So let’s set the record straight right off. First, I don’t want your money. If you want to be wealthier tomorrow than you otherwise would be, don’t give your hard earned money to people promising divine returns in cash and pain-free living.

 

Second, this series is concerned with a different sort of abundance than the desire for the luxury car, vacation home, and bling played by scam-artist preachers attempting to move money from other people’s pockets to theirs. Doing Business in the Kingdom of Heaven concerns experiencing and producing spiritual abundance while engaged in daily business, which encompasses every area of our lives where cooperation with others is essential to achieving mutually beneficial outcomes.  

 

In last quarter’s Good to Great, I first addressed how embracing the Transmillennial view liberates us from bondage to anxious striving for the divine acceptance. We can experience the liberty that God revealed in Christ/covenantal fulfillment because it is already ours perfectly. In this more-than-merely-great, fully perfected state of reconciliation, we are free to actively participate in the divine will through resource re-allocation to the real challenges that face us in space and time.

 

Alicia from Doniphan, Missouri responded to Good to Great with a great example of how this perspective generates here-and-now impact in her life:

 

“I am an RN and work in a very busy emergency room. We see lots of people from all walks of life. The Transmillennial view has greatly affected my patient care in a positive way…Knowing that we have a loving God with us at all times is a great stress reducer in my field when the pressure’s on.”

 

We don’t have to be in Alicia’s shoes—where decision making and actions sometimes determine whether someone will live or die, suffer or be comforted—to know how dysfunctional responses to pressure and stress often lead to undesirable outcomes, including an impoverished experience of life itself. 

 

For many of us, life’s stresses frequently arise from conflicting agendas and demands that pit income-producing work and the rest of our lives against each other. Stewart D. Friedman, the Practice Professor of Management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in Philadelphia, is the founding director of both Wharton’s Leadership Program and its Work/Life Integration Project. He is also the author of numerous books, including Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life forthcoming from Harvard Business Press. The April, 2008 Harvard Business Review includes an article by Professor Friedman on his book’s topic that I will refer to here to further connect the fulfilled Transmillennial view to personal and organizational transformation.

 

Similar to Presence’s four quadrants of transformation (personal, organizational, societal and covenantal), four domains of life interest Friedman: work, home, community and self. We too typically assume that resource allocation across these four quadrants (or domains) is a zero-sum game. That is, we perceive resource allocation to be controlled by an inviolable law of time-limits, i.e., we have but twenty-four hours in a day, seven days in a week and so on. We therefore conclude that we must make either/or time resource allocation decisions. For instance, in order to give an hour more to community, we must sacrifice an hour someplace else such as twenty minutes each from home, self and work. Friedman refuses to be bound by this paradigm and suggests that a new approach will enrich us all.

 

According to Friedman, the way out of this closed-loop, zero-sum thinking and behaving is “systematically designing and implementing carefully crafted experiments – doing something new for a short period to see how it affects all four domains. If an experiment doesn’t work out, just stop it, and little is lost. If it does work out, it’s a small win; over time these add up so that overall efforts are focused increasingly on what and who matter most.”

 

For example, dedicating an hour or so of off-time to plan and schedule work tasks for the coming week may increase productivity to the point where time is made available for investing in home, self and community endeavors. Likewise, regular exercise in moderation (time investment in self) can increase attentiveness and energy for home, work and community activities, thereby producing heightened performance in all domains.

 

Friedman emphasizes three fundamental needs or prerequisites to effective experimentation:

 

 

Consulting with peer coaches or mentors who know us well is essential to identifying authentic/real priorities that matter.

 

Likewise, infusing integrity/wholeness into this transformative work involves discovering what key stakeholders—spouses, children, bosses, partners and community organizations—expect from us. These expectations may be considerably less than we’ve imagined. In fact, the best experiments are changes that stakeholders may wish for as much or more than we do.

 

Finally, being innovative/creative involves a brainstorming process in which we identify new ways to make our lives more abundant, i.e., authentic, integrated and creative/generative. Where the zero-sum paradigm yields the frustration of either-or choices, this approach offers both/and abundance in both thought and effect.

 

Friedman offers additional, detailed suggestions for designing experiments to improve all domains of our lives, of which I’ll mention just two key recommendations. First, have a firm grasp on each experiment’s goals. Second, determine how to measure successful goal achievement. 

 

You may already appreciate that these experiments are not equivalent to New Year’s Day resolutions. The latter are typically made without regard to integration across all domains of life. Though rooted in hope, resolutions are too often established with a single domain in mind, e.g., spend more time with spouse (home), expand the business into a new market (work), coach youth soccer (community), read a book a month (self). Consequently, the impact of each goal on other domains or goals within those domains is inadequately considered. Coaching, reading and increased work hours, for example, just might reduce time with your spouse. Moreover, little if any regard is usually given to consulting in advance about resolutions with advisors and stakeholders. Is it any wonder, then, that many of us end up frustrated by failure to achieve the goals we earnestly resolved to reach? Worse, failure to achieve a goal may diminish our sense of self-worth, whereas a failed experiment is merely a learning experience.

 

When reading his Sermon on the Mount, listen to Jesus suggesting experiments instead of demands. “If you have two coats…” “If you are offering your gift at the altar…” “If someone wants to sue you…” “If someone forces you to go one mile…” Try them and discover what happens.

 

Variations on these experiments have potential for manifesting the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, thereby producing here-and-now abundance. Failure in either implementation or outcome may not produce the abundance sought, but we need not fear that this will yield suffering or block our way to new experimentation. Liberated from judgment and condemnation in the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth, we are participants in the divine will, blessed with endless opportunities to craft new experiments that have the potential to increase the abundance of our lives across all domains.

 

Finally, these are the essential principles for building a richer/abundant life through experimentation:

 

 

I invite you to send me your responses to this article, especially accounts of your experiences with small experiments. Please send emails to rhunter@healthinfonetmt.com. In the next article in this series, I intend to address individual, organizational and societal efforts to convert others to gain their acceptance of, and support for, particular ideas and actions. Your advance thoughts on this subject are also invited. For example, in what respects do you think war, economic sanctions, trade barriers, marketing, promotion, sales, debates, political campaigns, bargaining and negotiations similar to, and different from, religious conversion efforts? Do efforts to convert others enhance or diminish their and our abundance?  Are there creative, generative alternatives to conversion? Until next time, then, may Doing Business in the Kingdom of Heaven produce abundance for others as it does for you.

 

URL: http://www.presence.tv/cms/org_a-richer-life.php

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