A deeply meaningful Listening Retreat with the Goldenwood team in May this year preceded my becoming part of the Dream Forum. At the retreat, I learned of the sublime power of listening to God with intentionality in a community. I returned from the retreat renewed with the “spiritual garden” of my soul, richly nourished in a time of profound workplace anxiety. I became committed to enjoying grace in my work by single-heartedly relying on God for praise, promotion, and purpose. Gone were the days of “people pleasing” and “proving myself”.
Sensing the opportunity to capture a prescient symbol of my commitment to growing in grace once back home after the retreat, I snapped a photo of my barren pre-summer garden with the hopeful intent of revisiting the garden to take a contrasting photo later on in the summer after yielding the fruit of cultivation. Now, in October, while the garden is not as glorious as I would have liked, thankfully, I enjoyed the dreamed-of opportunity to take the before-and-after photo, praising God for the beautiful bounty of a harvest grown by exercising the grace of dominion.
Godly dominion is a grace that God must empower. It cannot be forced, manipulated, or cajoled. Sometimes, it requires patience. Sometimes, it requires passionate pursuit. To learn the difference, one must inquire and listen…leading me to my tomatoes. It is October, and I have many green tomatoes still in my garden. I want them to be red, but so many are still green. With frost quickly approaching, I am hoping some will still turn red, but if not, I will have to harvest them before the frost comes and try to ripen them indoors or find some delicious recipes using green tomatoes. Whatever the case, I must be patient when appropriate and pursue when appropriate, both actions requiring the same skills as inquiring and listening.
After the elation of joining the Dream Forum, I started frantically formulating aggressive numerical goals and targets with strict deadlines to build the foundation for my workforce development project of training marginalized populations in professional selling skills. In one of my scheduled community listening prayer sessions with my fellow dreamers, however, a few of my peers admonished me to be patient and deliberate in the developmental stages of my project. They challenged me to take my time under the unction of God’s wisdom attained through prayer. Graciously, my teammates’ decelerating words that typically would have brought me frustration instead brought me peace. Indeed, there is power in inquiring and listening in a community.
Positioned to listen with a newfound inquisitive and contemplative outlook, I received the inspiring idea to write a book on professional sales from a Spiritual perspective, coupling my over 30 years of sales experience with my knowledge of God and His word. The book entitled LifeLifting Sales parallels today’s marginalized workers who feel “sold out” into underemployment with the biblical Joseph in Genesis, who was “sold out” into slavery. In the book, we examine how Joseph’s gracious character and God’s grace lifted him up to exercise dominion, selling corn in a famine so others could live. We then highlight Joseph’s skills and values as a path to exercise dominion in the marketplace through selling, bringing life to their families and communities.
In the context of my dream to develop Faith Professional Sales Institute (FPSI), the LifeLifting Sales book will serve many valuable purposes. The first is a professional platform to speak with authority on faith and sales aided by the gravitas of a published book. The second is a sourcebook to develop a transformative selling curriculum for FPSI training. The third is a publishing project that will be a springboard to cultivate a publishing company to produce faith-based books for education, enrichment, and enlightenment.
Using the symbol of the tomato, the progress of my dream is still “green.” Nevertheless, green is good as long as I inquire and listen, being attentive to when it is time to be patient and when to pursue. I am confident that I will see my dream come to fruition in bright red glory…before the frost comes!
Carney R. Burns Jr. is one of twelve Dream Pod Members in Goldenwood’s 2023 Dream Forum. This reflection is part of Goldenwood’s #InsidetheDreamPod series.
About Carney’s dream, the Faith Professional Sales Institute: Having raised a family of five children (four college graduates so far) over a 30-year career as a sales professional, I have experienced the power of a career in professional business-to-business sales. In my volunteer activities in prison re-entry ministries, I encountered people with the innate talent to be successful salespeople, but they were unaware of the career path to seize the opportunity. This discrepancy led me to start Faith Professional Sales Institute (FPSI) to train marginalized populations in the principles of professional selling as a way to develop successful, family-building careers.