An Eroding Skepticism for Miracles

I apologize for taking so long to update this blog. Since there was not enough time to write during the venture, I am taking some time to outline events and write down new entries.

As the days pass, it is getting harder to recall the exact chronological sequence of events, so I'll start writing about things in a more event driven fashion. This is the pace of our life in South Africa. In our training, we were taught the difference between kairos and chronos as layed out in the Bible. My life in America is driven more by chronos. We are ruled by our schedules and especially in the bay area, we all try to fit in as much as possible perhaps without questioning whether we are doing the right things. Our life during the venture was dictated more by kairos, an event driven sense of time where you move on to the next event when it is the right time. Of course this sense of kairos was probably aided by the sense of chronos on the part of Sandra, our operations manager and a healthy dosage of options.

It was easy to see how the life of my client was driven by a sense of kairos. He has multiple talents and can count the ability to create new processes among them. However, he seems to do things when he sees it is the right time. Perhaps because he and his wife are both spread thin amongst 5 businesses, he takes more of a tactical view when deciding prioritization of his activities. I am not saying that he does not address the long term strategic view, but his experience in running businesses for 20+ years allows him to know when to switch between tactical and strategic views of his businesses. However, some of the strategic issues with the business I was consulting for were seemingly unassailable. He was expecting that it would take a miracle in order for this business to take off and was demanding no less from God.

Just to keep you apprised on where I am with miracles, I am more of a skeptic. I will acknowledge that they can happen but I am skeptical as to their frequency and the way they are interpreted most of the time. However, I was dealing with a man who had experienced minor miracles on a regular basis throughout the time he had been in business. He had originally started the business in question in order to make money. It has the most potential out of all of his businesses but has been thwarted by different things over the years. At the same time, he recognized that the way he had come to start the business was through a series of amazing coincidences that he felt could have only been set up by God. After interviewing him several times and hearing his personal struggles, his story does seem very unlikely without the help of God.

What makes his story more plausible to me though is that he did not just have everything dropped in his lap. Part of the secret sauce for his business was developed over a very intense period where he put in 18 hr days/6X a week for ~5 years. He has had to deal with the nitty gritty details of running a business in South Africa. He has to confront the current culture and work ethic of his workers in order to reform them into people who have a natural bent to produce high quality products. He has had to deal with the current political environment that seems to require that you have black people on payroll in order to become a supplier to the South African government. I don't pretend to know the exact implementation of the Black Economic Empowerment policy in South Africa but it seems that it does not fully extend to colored people.

Colored people? Let me clarify. In South Africa, there seems to be more than just white and black people. The actual indigenous people of the Cape area are known as the Khoi and they are a brown-skinned people. Most of the black people in South Africa come from the northern Zulu and Xhosa tribes. Similar to how many white people view asian people as a homogenous group (as opposed to being Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc.) in America, a lot of outsiders do not make the distinction between black and colored people in South Africa. However, it is not such a foreign concept in America. One of my former co-workers grew up in Texas during the civil rights movement era and he described the public restrooms there being divided into white, black, and colored (mostly hispanic) groups as well.

Anyway, my client has gone through much in order to keep his business afloat. He described to me situations where he felt compelled to do the right thing for his people rather than the right thing for the business and was rewarded each time. One example would be in a year where his incoming business was shrinking due to increased competition from overseas Chinese manufacturers (a continuing situation today) and he did not really have enough money to give his employees their customary yearly bonus paycheck and their customary 10% pay raise. However, he knew that withholding this money would have consequences regarding their loyalty as they typically tend to live paycheck to paycheck. Although financial wisdom is something he is trying impart to his employees, it takes time to change spending habits.

Long story short. With no prospects of being able to afford the bonus/pay raise, he receives an order a couple days later that allows him to keep everyone employed for another 3 months...and at the end of the 3 months receives another order for another 3 month extension. As a skeptic, I would be tempted to say that it could easily be coincidence, but the frequency of the type of things he is describing to me seems to indicate a whole lot of luck. Even though the secret sauce of his business was created through a lot of hard work, it is implausible that he could have developed such a thing with the resources he had. It is something that even other major corporations and conglomerates around the world cannot reproduce.

So as a result, my client is a man in whom God has built up much character over the years. Although by nature he likes to micromanage things, he has also developed this amazing dependence upon God for the things that he knows he cannot control. Keep in mind, this does not mean that he doesn't get frustrated or keep seeking out ways to change his situation (otherwise I wouldn't end up being his consultant).

Over the course of the venture, I began to realize that the frequency and type of miracles may depend more on the person to whom God is speaking to.