Recently I attended a weeklong non-profit conference and had the opportunity to converse with hundreds of colleagues who also work with a passion to fulfill a mission or calling. It is always good to share stories, challenges, future plans and visions, and even complaints. Sometimes these conversations are therapeutic, sometimes instructional, sometimes both.

Intentional listening is always a great learning opportunity, but additionally, sharing with others is also instructive, for me, as I get to see reactions first-hand to the things I say and show passion for. I can always learn something from seeing how my thoughts resonate (or not) with others.

At this conference, during these conversations, I occasionally pulled from things that I wrote in my book. This later gave me the opportunity to look up those same thoughts as I wrote them down back then, to see how I expressed them, and compare them to how I just said them recently.

A recent example of that is the place in the book where I talked about striving to “get it right” and how humans are not really all that capable of doing that, and that reliance on the Holy Spirit guarantees “getting it right” every time, as He cannot make a mistake. In business, this thought is often foreign. As leaders in business we feel the stress and weight of responsibility to make good decisions and plan good directions, and even though as believers we may try to practice following the Spirit’s leading, we usually just do what we think is best, and then ask Him to bless it, or help us down the road if our direction encounters a barrier.

The conversation I’m thinking about followed that line. The person I spoke with expressed that they were a believer but followed it, as we all do sometimes, with a “yeah, but….”. “Yeah, but I don’t know how to hear from God”. “Yeah, but I’m not sure I hear Him correctly”. And etcetera.

Well, there are no “yeahbuts” that I’ve ever seen, even my own, that worked out better than simply following what we believe He is saying, and knowing that even if we got that wrong, He would still cover us because we were attempting to let HIM get it right, not us.

God WILL lead us, if we ask Him, and trust Him in executing what He said, even if we’re not sure. Business leaders take on more responsibility than they need to. It is His. Let Him lead.

In that conversation, I learned that what I wrote in the book is still hard to take sometimes, but it’s truth is still relevant and foundational.

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