Today was a great day on the encouragement front. I had planned to attend a free training at 1:00 pm on the changes that are going to be made to Facebook and Instagram and what you need to do to help your business thrive online after they make the changes. This sounded like something that might be useful to me and as it was free, I thought I'd watch it. But ten minutes before the training, I decided that actually I wasn't going to bother going because I don't really use either platform at the moment to promote my business and I could probably watch a training like this a little further down the line when I'm at the stage of a big promotion push. I have an Instagram account where I currently post photos of cake and coffee and I just created a business Facebook page but haven't done anything with it yet so I'm not exactly a high level user.
I was in my emails ready to click on the training link, so I clicked off the email and saw another link in my inbox from The Tent Peg Collective. They were having their prayer session at 1:00 pm. I've never been to one of the prayer meetups so I decided to join that instead of the Facebook training and I'm so glad I did. It's lead by an amazing woman who prays the most powerful beautiful prayers. Every month there's a theme in the training and this month is about branding and business identity, so they provide lots of resources on branding yourself and coming up with your specific niche in the market. They also provide prayer points that relate to the topic, so she lead us through some Bible texts and prayed over specific aspects of business with us. Then she asked for any requests from the attendees.
I asked for prayer as I started my business and explained that I really had no idea what I was doing but just for clarity and customers. She prayed such an encouraging prayer over me and included the phrase, "Don’t despise small beginnings" repeatedly. Which was such a great reminder for me as I do struggle with trying to run before I can walk, or maybe even crawl or even sit up. She also prayed that God would "shock me" with his goodness. I loved that. It was the best hour and a half I've spent recently on business building and I think a much better use of my time than a Facebook training that probably would have just reminded me how much I don't know about marketing myself.
This evening, I had a phone call from another lovely friend who I'm in a book club with. She also prayed over my family a prayer of encouragement and it was so nice to talk to her. I feel encouraged and ready to face another day.
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For today's quote, I'm going with the first part of Zechariah 4:10 from the Bible, "Do not despise these small beginnings, for the LORD rejoices to see the work begin."
My photo for today is of me as a snapchat filter baby to celebrate small beginnings. I have no idea how to use snapchat either. I just have it because the filters amuse me.