Wholesale

Definition: Wholesaling is the act of buying goods in bulk from a manufacturer at a discounted price and selling to a retailer for a higher price, for them to repackage and in turn resell in smaller quantities at an even higher price to consumers.

A big sales chain claims to be a wholesaler, but you’ve probably seen the “Not For Resale” tags on their clothing and tires. How can they claim to be a wholesaler when most of their clients are consumers and many of their products cannot be resold?

Anyway, this proves that if you cut out the middleman, things are usually better.
Likewise, if you don’t like religion or church, why not talk and listen directly to the source? Why not talk and listen to God?

More and more people have had a bad experience with a church, and then say that they don’t believe in God, when really they just don’t like church. So, why not skip the middle man, and talk and listen to God directly?

What? You didn’t know you could do that? I’m sure you know you can talk to God anytime. It’s the listening that’s the hard part, right?

Listening to God is hard, and to make matters worse, what works for some, doesn’t work for others. I think the most common method is to open your Bible to a random page, and with your eyes closed, point to a verse. That rarely works for me.

Some people pray and then get a Bible verse in their head. Others speak in tongues and then they usually need someone to interpret it for them. I personally just get feelings from my heart, my conscience, and/or my gut.

But what do you do when you get conflicting messages? Like, if your heart tells you that you’re in love with someone, but your gut tells you that you’re not, it’s probably not your heart talking. Typically, it’s the one feeling that you want to do the least, the one is better for others more than better for you. That is usually the right feeling.

That leads me to, what about if you feel you should do something that you don’t want to do? That’s probably why most people stop listening to their feelings. Often, when God tells us to do something, we don’t want to do it. But when we do, we usually find that good things happen because of it.

For example, lately I have had the feeling that my wife and I should take our building manager out for dinner. This is something neither I nor my wife want to do, as the bridges are burned. I know that this would increase understanding between us, and resolve a lot of problems, but I’m not ready for that yet. Does that mean that I stop listening? No, because I know that it’s in my best interest to do it, I probably eventually will do it, and it will make things better. And even if I don’t do it, I don’t want to lose the feelings, and miss out on other opportunities. So, I continue to listen to my heart, conscience, and gut.

Of course, it doesn’t hurt to read The Bible from cover to cover. Some like to read the book of Mark first, but I started with Matthew and read the whole New Testament before reading the Old Testament. But really, it’s the N.T. that’s important; the O.T. is just the optional history lesson.

That’s what my stories are about, people listening to their heart, conscience and gut.