Accessing your window of opportunity

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by Richard Gazowsky

I have been amazed in my life by how many leaders are totally clueless about windows of opportunity. Since I’m in the Silicon Valley area of San Francisco, I have many times had people come to me with great business ventures. But their idea is just totally out of time. They are trying to copy a business plan that has already passed its window of opportunity. An example of this is the computer industry. Most of the companies that make personal computers today were founded between 1976 and 1981. There was a window that opened in the computer industry during that period and those that recognized the time took advantage of it. They found their place in the market. You can find this phenomenon in almost any field of business.

For new startups to be successful, they need to find a window of opportunity to where the marketplace has given them access to the customer base they wish to reach. Personally, I feel that this is a spiritual and physical phenomenon. And this is the reason I personally value the prophetic voice that exists so widely in the church today. It is this prophetic voice that can show you and help you access this window of opportunity.

For a window to open, there usually needs to be a destabilization of some natural system, which leaves open a need to where that window can open and you can access it. One that is currently existing is within the oil industry. There is an incredible destabilization within the price of oil and if this window stays open much longer, it will actually give way to a new energy source that could make the use of fossil fuel obsolete. Personally, I have no interest in this. I am just making an observation for your better understanding of the truth I am trying to present on this subject.

God is in control of all windows. I would almost be compelled to write that sentence twice for the sheer purpose of impacting its simplicity. Until you understand that, nothing else in this article will make any sense to you. These windows that exist in business and life are completely arranged and directed by God’s divine purpose. Oh, for the glorious day that He opens a window for you!

A very close friend of mine, Ed Traut, who is a prophet from South Africa, just shared with me a story concerning his own accessing one of God’s windows. When he was a young man, God spoke to him and told him to come to America. But his pastor talked him out of it and he changed his mind and forgot about it. Years later, God spoke to him a second time. This time, also, he ignored the voice of the Lord. Then finally, God spoke to him and said, “This will be your last opportunity. I am asking you to move to America and prophesy over the nation. I won’t ask you again.” Ed argued with God because he was in a home in South Africa, paid for in full and everything about his lifestyle there was perfect. His kids loved their schools and his current situation was just too cozy to give up. Then suddenly the roof fell in. He had a medical problem that was most painful. This pain continued with such intensity that he nearly lost his life. But, Ed was able to argue with God, “I’m not resisting you God, I am resisting you because of my family.”

A little while later, he and his family were driving to church when suddenly the engine on his big car cut out. The car rolled to a stop while straddling a railroad track. There was no train and no cars around, but for safety’s sake, Ed had his family step out of the car and go over 200 feet down the road and away from the tracks. Ed painfully waited for a car to come by while trying to start the car, which proved to be impossible. He then got out of the car and tried to push it forward over the tracks, but the tracks were too high. He tried pushing it backwards, but the tracks were too high in that direction. When Ed had exhausted all of his efforts, he leaned against the car in frustration and said, “God, what is going on here?” His prayer was interrupted by the sound of distant horn of a coming train.

Terror riveted through Ed’s body and his wife hugged her children as she stood down the road in safety. Ed ran down the tracks as the train came around the mountain and tried to catch the attention of the engineer. But, it was to no avail- the huge freight train, towed by multiple engines, plowed on until it finally hit his lone car straddling the tracks and knocked it off the tracks. But an amazing thing happened at this moment. When the car was pushed off the track, it broke a taillight and a piece of the taillight flew through the air down the roadway and cut Ed’s daughter on her face. The car was hardly damaged and it immediately started up and ran perfectly. But when Ed saw his daughter’s face, the Lord

spoke to him and said, “See? You cannot even protect your own family. If you do not walk through this window, you will be out of my divine protection.” Ed Traut is not only now living in America, but he has now become an American citizen and is totally in the opportunity and full will of God that the Lord had prepared for him.

This is the real deal about God and his windows of opportunity. If we would just listen sensitively to His voice and His urgings and would obey them no matter how simple and how out of character they would appear to be, we would discover that our entire life has been planned out for us and what a fun life that would be!

If you remember, at the beginning of this year, I wrote an email and told you that I made a covenant with God not to anything unless He initiated it. The blog was called, “Alpha and Omega: The Great Initiator and End Game.” So now, I am four months into this year and let me tell you what has happened. In January, I had a dream where I wrestled with God and we argued through the night hours until we were physically fighting over doing a blog website. I wanted to do one that was cool and complex and God wanted me to do one that was honest, heart-wrenching and extremely simple in its design. Obviously, He won that battle. After this website, www.wysiwyghome.com, was up and running for a few months, God gave me another dream. In this dream, I was once again wrestling with God. But this time, it wasn’t about a website, it was about publishing a magazine. I wanted the magazine to look cool, but God wanted it to be simple and long, with a lot of articles based off the website we had just launched. I obeyed the Lord and walked through the window, even though it appeared to be contrary to all the coolness that I had been trying to achieve through the years of being in the movie industry. Here’s a sample cover of the first issue of the magazine:

Obviously to launch a 250 page magazine is quite an auspicious project and which is something that I in no way feel capable of doing, even though I do have experience with previously publishing a magazine. It is this experience that creates the mental block to the ability for something like this to be successful. But now we come back to the concept of windows. I realized i was clueless and the only way that I could even approach the project would be to follow God completely as an obedient child, rather than a self made man that would take advantage of an opportunity. Wow! Is this a different concept? For most of you businessmen and women that are reading this email, we all have a common element that we feel is that which qualifies us to do business. That is our innate ability to organize and put difficult projects together. Well, this is the very thing that God is not allowing me to access when it comes to walking through his opened window of magazine publishing for my organization!

The first command that God gave me was to simply do a mockup of the front cover and to present it before my church congregation. That mockup was the picture shown above. I printed a large poster of it and did a simple presentation of it to the church with no explanation of how we would accomplish it. To my astonishment, a young man in my congregation walked up to me and said, “Do you have distribution for your magazine?” I replied, “No.” He then said, “Would you mind if I set up an appointment for you with one of America’s largest distributors?” I did not even know that this young man had such connections and within a week, I was on the phone and sharing the concepts with this distribution company. At the end of the conversation, I realized that if the company accepted our magazine on face value, I would be faced with publishing 500,000 issues.

At this point, I must confess to you. I stepped out of God’s will and I made a few contacts with my own fleshly business aptitude and discovered that it would cost over $1.4 million USD to print the first issue. As soon as I saw that figure, my carnal mind began to conjure up unbelief. Within a few days, I was struggling with everything which made it necessary for me to go for a long period of prayer and die to myself once again and walk into the wide-eyed, bushy-tailed realm of faith, letting my heavenly Father completely take over the business plan once again.

Accessing the window of God’s plan for your business life or ministry is just the first step in a long series of humbling yourself before the will of God. When I began this journey, I was sitting in the prayer room for a three-hour session of prayer and the worship leader was singing this song about the river of God. It was a perfect setting, because I was totally freaked out about losing the pathway, somehow falling out of God’s will and not being able to find the flow of God’s river. At that point, God spoke to me with a very simple word and said, “Richard, the river was made for you.” Wow. Did that change everything? And that’s the way it is in my current journey through God’s open window. I realize every potential business need and business connection has already scoped out by God and the pathway that I am walking was carved just the right size for me.

I hope you also have this revelation in your life and can access the window of God that is before you.

Richard Gazowsky pastors a church in San Francisco called The Voice of Pentecost, and is also president of Christian WYSIWYG Filmworks. He has directed the films, “Guardians” and “The Roman Trilogy.”

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