There’s a tension I live with as a spirit-filled entrepreneur, and it shows up far more often than I’d like to admit. I’ll be moving through my work, building, creating, showing up, and out of nowhere I find myself stopping to ask the Lord some pretty hard questions.
Are my motives laid down?
Am I doing this for my own gain?
Is this about putting myself in the limelight, or is it about love? Is it about loving others?
Is what I’m doing right now motivated by fear, or is it actually led by God?
I used to think that constant inner questioning was a problem. Almost like a kind of turmoil I needed to fix or push past so I could finally feel confident in what I was building. I think a lot of people would look at that wrestling and assume something’s wrong. That if you really trusted God, you wouldn’t have to keep asking.
But here’s what I’ve come to believe instead.
That inner struggle, that holy tension, is actually what keeps you whole. It keeps you holy.
It’s Not About Earning Your Righteousness
Here’s the truth I keep coming back to. No amount of inner judgment, no amount of wrestling or self examination, will ever be what makes you righteous. It will never be what purifies your offering to the Lord, to the world around you, or to the people you love.
Jesus makes you righteous. Full stop.
That’s not something you produce through striving or perfecting your motives. It’s already been done.
So if that’s true, why does the questioning still matter? Why does the tension still show up?
The Difference Between Conviction and Condemnation
This is the part that changed everything for me. The Holy Spirit leads us, but He doesn’t lead through condemnation. He leads with kindness. With full confidence. With assurance.
That distinction matters more than I can put into words.
Condemnation makes you shrink. It makes you spiral, second guess everything, and eventually burn out trying to prove you’re worthy of what you’re building.
Conviction, the kind that comes from the Spirit, does something completely different. It refines you so you can actually lead and serve the people around you well. It produces a life that’s full of fruit. Joy. Purity. Something that isn’t self seeking and isn’t quietly building toward your own fall because of pride or putting something else in the place that belongs to God.
That’s the gift hiding inside the tension.
When Comparison Creeps In
If you’re an entrepreneur, you already know how easy it is to look around at people who seem to be moving faster, building bigger, or leading from a place that looks confident and unbothered.
Sometimes those people aren’t walking with the Lord at all. They’re self seeking, leading out of vanity, caught up in everything the world tells us to chase.
And it’s tempting to wonder if you’d get further faster if you stopped wrestling so much. If you just went after it the way they do.
Here’s what I want you to remember in that moment. The Lord is refining you. He’s refining everything you’re producing, and He’s doing it so that what comes out the other side is like gold.
Not fast. Not flashy. Gold.
Build On the Right Foundation
Everything I do, in my business and in how I coach the women I work with, comes back to this one truth. It’s built on the foundation of Jesus. And anything built on His foundation is going to last.
That’s not a nice sentiment to print on a mug. It’s the difference between a business that crumbles under pressure and one that holds steady because it was never standing on your own striving in the first place.
If you’ve read this far and something in you is nodding along, if you’ve felt that same tension and wondered whether it meant you were doing something wrong, I want you to hear me clearly. It doesn’t mean that. It means you’re paying attention to the right voice.
This is actually a huge part of what I walk through with the women I coach. So many of us are carrying businesses, callings, and dreams while also trying to figure out how to lead from a place of peace instead of pressure. We talk through what it looks like to let your motives be examined without letting shame take the wheel, and how to keep building something that’s actually rooted in who God says you are.
If that’s where you’re at right now, I’d love to talk with you. You can connect with me here and we can talk through what coaching together could look like for you.
And if you want more of this kind of conversation in your everyday life, I just launched the first episode of my podcast, Laughing Over Tomorrow. God gave me that name over ten years ago, and I’ve been living into it ever since, through marriage, four kids, homeschooling, and building businesses. We talk about homeschool mom life, learning to live in the life and peace of the Spirit that Jesus promised, the grace empowered hustle of entrepreneurship, worship, and so much more.
The foundation is His. Let’s see what He builds.
Listen to the first episode here
