What It Really Takes to Build Creative Acts of Praise

What It Really Takes to Build Creative Acts of Praise

This summer has been quite a journey. God has stretched my faith, asked me to trust Him more, required me to practice my listening skills, taught me to let go of the things I cannot control, and reminded me to simply do what He asks me to do.

And in the middle of all of that…He has built an e-commerce business and ministry.

I am truly in awe of what God can do.

When I first began moving forward with Creative Acts of Praise, I knew there would be work involved. I expected to create products, build a website, organize donations, and figure out how to tell people what the ministry was about.

What I did not fully understand was how many tiny pieces live underneath those very innocent-sounding words.

“Build a website” sounds simple enough.

Until you discover that building a website actually means choosing a theme, designing pages, organizing navigation, writing content, photographing products, creating product listings, setting prices, learning inventory systems, connecting payment processing, making sure links work, figuring out shipping, and occasionally staring at Shopify as though mutual understanding might somehow be achieved through eye contact.

Then there is the business side.

Accounting. Recordkeeping. Inventory. Pricing. Policies. Organization. Planning. Communication. Following up with people. Keeping track of what has been donated, what is available, what has sold, and what still needs to be done.

And because Creative Acts of Praise is not simply a store, there is another layer entirely.

How do we tell the stories of the people who create and donate?

How do we invite people into prayer?

How do we build a community rather than simply collect customers?

How do we use social media in a way that brings people into the ministry instead of just placing another product in front of them?

How do Pam and Persephanie help tell those stories?

How do we make the website feel like a home people want to explore rather than another online store trying to rush them toward a checkout button?

There have been days when I have made progress quickly and felt like everything was finally coming together.

There have also been days when I have spent hours solving something that, in my mind, should have taken approximately eleven minutes.

I have changed decisions.

I have rebuilt things.

I have learned programs I had never used before.

I have created systems, discovered why they did not work, and created better systems.

And somewhere in all of that, I began to understand that this work is part of the ministry too.

Faithful stewardship is not always the visible part.

Sometimes stewardship looks like prayer.

Sometimes it looks like sitting quietly and listening for what God is asking me to do next.

Sometimes it looks like creating something beautiful.

And sometimes it looks like a spreadsheet, twelve browser tabs, a cup of coffee that went cold two hours ago, and me asking God for patience because apparently the button really does need to be three pixels to the left.

I used to think that if God gave me the vision, I was supposed to know how to accomplish it.

This summer has taught me something very different.

I do not have to know every step.

I have to be willing to take the next one.

There have been many moments when I wanted to get ahead of God—to solve tomorrow’s problem today, to force an answer, to make something happen because I thought it was taking too long.

Instead, I keep being brought back to the same lesson:

Listen.

Trust.

Do what He asks me to do.

Then wait until He shows me the next thing.

That has probably been one of the hardest parts of building Creative Acts of Praise—and one of the most important.

Because this ministry is not something I want to build and then ask God to bless.

I want it to become whatever He intended it to be in the first place.

So when I look at the website today, I see much more than pages, products, photographs, and menus.

I see answered prayers.

I see people who have come alongside the ministry at exactly the right time.

I see creators who have generously placed the work of their hands into ours.

I see ideas that arrived when I needed them.

I see doors that opened.

I see things that did not work—and now I can sometimes even be grateful that they did not.

Most of all, I see how much God can do when we are willing to place what we have in His hands and simply keep saying yes.

Creative Acts of Praise is still being built.

There is still plenty to learn, plenty to finish, and—judging by recent experience—probably at least one more piece of technology waiting somewhere to humble me.

But I am no longer looking at everything that remains to be done and wondering how I am going to build it all.

I am learning to look at what God has already done and ask a much simpler question:

What do You want me to do next?

And then I go back to work.