ABOUT JACKIE B. GRICE
I always knew there was something I was purposed to do beyond being the co-owner of a transportation company.
I grew up as the youngest of nine in a family where my parents were entrepreneurs. My father was an upholsterer. I grew up with his love to create innovative products, take old furniture, and remake things into beautiful home furnishings.
When COVID-19 hit, we were on target to have our biggest sales year ever. Up until that point, I was winning contracts, and it seemed like everything I pursued, doors just opened. When COVID hit, it was like my business, and our livelihood was in the bullseye of this pandemic.
People were not getting on charter buses, schools closed, athletic programs stopped, and our business came to a halt overnight. The bills kept coming, but the revenue ended. Then the government loans came out, and I knew I would be okay because, after all, I always seemed to have favor when opportunities opened up. But not this time. My loan paperwork ended up lost in the system, and I found myself with only enough funding to repay my mounting customer refunds from the many trip cancellations. For the first time in my life, I felt like every single door that I saw others walk through, seemed to close for me.
The hardest part was furloughing my employees that relied on our company to put food on their tables. Due to the mounting pressure, it appeared that my husband and I were at odds as we tried to figure out how to navigate through these strange and uncertain times. It seemed that we might not be able to weather this storm.
I would pray for a breakthrough, but it seemed like God was not answering any of my prayers.
Reluctantly I reached out to my Pastor and his wife for some guidance because I felt like I had failed them in some way or another. Oddly enough, he instructed me to spend two days in silence, listening to God. My Pastor said that is what he was hearing God say to him regarding our situation.
Listening in silence was not a new concept to me.
I learned about hearing God clearer by getting silent for extended periods from a program I attended in Richmond, Virginia. It was also ironic that the place I learned about listening in the silence was having a virtual silence session the same day my Pastor instructed me to start my two-day silence journey.
That next day was like an experience I had ever encountered. I sat in my yard under a grouping of trees, and God spoke. He gave me more clarity than I had received my entire life! What I heard laid the foundations for this ministry and gave me clarity in my business. I realized that everything that had happened until this point was necessary to bring me to a point where I was vulnerable enough to hear God speak!
I was going through life and was doing a lot of good and often great things. But God had purposed me for so much more. Those two days changed my life. I am committed to daily spending time with God just listening, not asking for things, or making requests but asking a simple question and getting quiet to hear God's revelation. This time allowed me to see who I was and to see what my purpose was in this world clearer.
With a clearer vision, I am now able to launch deeper and go further in my business and in my ministry than I ever thought I would be able to go. I desire to show others how to do the same.
At the beginning of the year, as I traveled back from a vacation in Dubai, I made a declaration.
I asked God at the beginning of 2020 to take me where my feet could not take me.
I didn't realize the depth of that declaration. I wanted to go where my friends, connections, resources, or influence could not take me. I now know I was asking God to launch me into the deep. I was asking God to take me to a place where only faith could take me. Well, little did I know that God would answer that call under a tree in my front yard.
I know that we all have more in us. I know that inside each of us, there are seeds of greatness, but most of us never realize our true potential. As much as we achieve, there is still often a tugging for something else, something more. Often this tug is the pull to launch deeper, to walk where our feet alone cant take us.