Sanctifying the Receptionist’s Land

There are at least four significant areas of a business that could benefit from extra heavily blessed land. They are the CEO’s office, the COO’s office, the Director of Marketing and the person who first answers the phone. We will develop these in reverse order over the next few days.

For purposes of discussion, I am assuming that this is a Kingdom business. The perversion of the recent past said that the businessman makes money to give to the church for the church to do the Kingdom work. The original model, which is being restored these days, is that the business is a magnificent playing field for all kinds of Kingdom work to take place.

With that in mind, the receptionist is no longer an economic drain on the company to be replaced with a sterile messaging center. Rather, he or she becomes the first player on the stage of a divine drama which plays out in this business realm.

For that reason it is important to design the land blessings around the receptionist’s strengths. Let’s call her Sally. You will begin by exploring Sally’s design strengths and the character qualities she has developed over the years. Design and character are spiritual dynamics which are transmissible in the spiritual realm over the phone line, while learned skills (filing, typing, and bookkeeping) do not affect the caller’s spirit over the phone.

Sally happens to be a well-rounded person with an abundance of strengths, but they seem to cluster around the fact that she always gets the job done. She simply does not do powerlessness. No matter what odd problem the boss comes up with, she knows how to solve it, or knows how to learn how to solve it. Her standard answer to any request is “Consider it done!”

And the staff has learned that those are no empty words. She is formidable at solving logistical problems others have created. She can always find those 1300 left-handed doo hickeys that are needed to complete the Jones Project, and she can find a way to get them from East Overshoe, Iowa to the assembly line, in time.

This then, becomes a card in the hand of the King. Sally has potential exposure to fellow employees, customers, vendors and the constant stream of extraneous salesmen who offer everything from office supplies to self-composting potato peelers.

On any given day, the King has an abundance of people who have lost their perspective, bought into a spirit of powerlessness, and therefore are losing their momentum in the battle for life.

On this day, He decides to pair Sally up with Jamie, the secretary of one of their customers. Jamie’s marriage is on the rocks and it is rocking her world in a big way. The King effortlessly scrambles things on the buyer’s desk so he does not have time to make the call himself, like he normally would, so he gives a confused command to Jamie and tells her to find out what happened to the widgets that were supposed to be delivered by noon. He growls that only the granular ones came but he really needed the striated ones.

This almost puts Jamie over the edge. She does not need any more stress. She certainly does not need to look like a fool, calling a stranger about an order she does not understand, only to get bad news which she then will have to relay to her boss, only to get yelled at for things that are not her fault.

Trembling inside, Jamie dials the number. As soon as she hears Sally’s strong, cheerful voice, the knot in her chest loosens up a little bit. She gives her muddled explanation about the order and starts apologizing for not having the order number or really understanding what a striated widget is.

Sally assures her that this is a doable project. She calmly asks for the easily available information like the company name. Jamie sits and torments the telephone cord while listening to Sally clicking away on the keyboard, mumbling to herself.

Finally, there is a cheerful yelp. “I found it! Does this sound right: seventy-two steel colored granular widgets and 26 oversized, left-handed Chartreuse striated widgets?”

Jamie goes tense again. “I really don’t know. I’m sorry. The boss just tossed this on my desk as he ran out. I guess it is the right order.”

Sally comes right back. “Well, there is no point in our bumbling around here since neither of us could tell the difference between a striated widget and a green kangaroo in a palm tree in Norway. Let me call the salesman who took this order and get it sorted out.”

The phone cord which already looked as tangled as a congressional hearing got a reprieve while Jamie envisioned the kangaroo. Sally came back on the line, confirmed that it was the right order, admitted that shipping had messed up big time by leaving out the wretched unpronounceable widgets, but that their delivery man would make a special trip across town and would have them on Jamie’s desk no later than 4:00 p.m. “Would this work?”

Jamie breathed a big sigh of relief and told Sally how much she appreciated her making an impossible situation simple.

The phone cord suffered less than the usual amount of abuse the rest of that day. AND Jamie went home with enough emotional energy to try reaching out to her husband one more time.

And the King smiled because while Sally and Jamie’s souls were discussing widgets and kangaroos, Jamie’s spirit was drinking deeply of the dominion and joy that radiated from Sally’s spirit, and her own spirit of powerlessness got pushed to the back. Kingdom work had been accomplished in the playing field of the marketplace.

A Principle: Every encounter between two people in the marketplace can involve a spiritual transfer of life, not just a natural transfer of data.

If Sally is a powerhouse of dominion, and there is a city full of people who are in the clutches of a spirit of powerlessness, then the King only has to create a plausible business excuse for the powerless people to communicate with Sally to receive a spiritual transfer of life from her to them.

The problem however, lies in the numbers. By the end of the day, when Sally has been life giving in the natural and in the spiritual realms to 30 astoundingly inept, powerless, paralyzed problem people, she is apt to feel pretty burned out on people and their problems. She will not be in the best shape to go home and face her three teenagers (and the five powerless, conflicted, confused friends they drug along for dinner).

So in order to keep from depleting Sally every day, the CEO needs to begin blessing the land at her desk so that the person and the land together have a larger stream of life for the King to use in His widespread Kingdom work of extending life, hope and dominion to the victims of His ancient enemy.

So let’s start with Noah. He had a project that was socially unacceptable. He built and preached for 120 years with no support outside his immediate family. That meant that all of his emotional support in the face of a hostile community had to come from the memory of the directive he received from God years before.

“Land, I bless you with restoring to people their perspective of what God has called them to be and do, so they no longer are traumatized by what people say about them and their calling, when it is delayed.”

Or Naomi’s recognition of the hand of God in placing Ruth in the field of a kinsman, instead of gleaning in any other field. “Land, I bless you with being a place where people can see the initial gifts of God, and therefore have faith to believe that God will finish the process He began.”

How about David and the Temple? He could not build it, but he could accrue the resources and raise up the son who would build it. “Land, many people are blocked from going forward where they want to. However, God often makes a way forward in a different area, which will eventually achieve the desired result. I bless you land, with being a place where people clearly see what they can do with the available resources, instead of seeing where they are blocked.”

I love the story of Ehud. Because he was left-handed, he could do some things others could not do. “Land I bless you with the ability to help people celebrate their uniqueness as points of strength, instead of as deficits.”

The list of possible blessings is endless because Scripture from beginning to end is about the battle between the God who called us to dominion, and the devil who wants us to be defeated and to stay defeated by buying into a spirit of powerlessness.

In summary, match the blessings for the land to the strength of the person on the phone, so that the life of God can flow deep and wide to whoever He causes to call in. Think of it as a phone line with DSL on it. There is a phone conversation happening on the soul level. But at the same time that this is taking place in the natural, there is also a spiritual conversation going on and this is the one that matters – not the striated widgets that went AWOL. Those were just the King’s excuse to connect a powerless person with a women whose spirit KNOWS dominion in a big way.

Copyright November 2010 by Arthur Burk
At home, in Fullerton

Have you noticed that the blogs I write from home are a whole lot wordier than the ones elsewhere? I wonder what that says about this land. Hmmm….have I accidentally done something right here or am I just discovering a deposit which God placed in this land before He brought me here? Or maybe I need to cleanse the land of the excessive wordiness and bless it with being more concise and focused.

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