Don't give up on God

Well I'm back from NY and wow, what a day I had. An awesome experience. While the day was focused on the things necessary to get others, particularly venture capitalist excited enough about your business to want to invest in it, for me it was an awesome opportunity to network with a broader group of people. But more importantly, it was a test to see how strong I was in my faith in the midst of a group of complete strangers. As I shared my product and my ideas for future products, it was very interesting to watch the reactions. What a wonderful feeling it was to get some pretty positive feedback on my thoughts and ideas.

It was interesting as I listened and watched David Crowley, co-founder of foursquare, and others discuss how their products address the social and secular needs of the community. The passion which these leaders show about what they create and who they create for is second to none. And as I sat there watching I thought about how cool it was that while the focus was on getting funding and the ultimate goal, and test, for a company's success is the amount of revenue it can generate. But you listen and you hear all of these entrepreneurs as they look to use their technical and entrepreneurial skill sets to create a unique and helpful experience for their customers.

One particular statement that really hit me was from Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media. He said, and I'm paraphrasing here, that he did not want to hear stats about how many downloads an app has, but more about how many times an app is being reused. This struck a nerve, as when I set out on my journey I saw so many apps in the app store that in my opinion are useless. I wanted to create something useful, easy to use, and with the ability to really help an individual be more productive with their prayer life. It's important to note here that productive does not mean giving counts of the number of times God answers our prayers (that is not needed as we are told in the Bible that God hears and answers all prayers offered in His will so we can be assured we are getting an answer but it just may not be what we want or expect), but productive means helping people pray regularly. Prayer can be a daunting task with so much else rolling around in our brains from the normal stress of our lives. As with anything, being a little organized can go a long way in helping us accomplish anything, and that is the same with prayer.

This morning's devotion focused on not giving up on God to help us look for solutions. How important that thought is. It is so easy in these times we live in to look to other avenues to help solve our problems. While these may give us short term relief in our current situation, when we give up on God to help us, we are rejecting the greatest gift that we've been given.

May God bless your Friday.