On New Years 2007 our family was down in St. Thomas staying at our Ritz Carlton shared town house for New Years – one of our allotted weeks. Early that morning I had a night time spoken word that changed my life. You can read about it in detail on our Watch Japan posts and podcasts page. It was about Japan and its monetary policy. It was prophetic as it portended a central bank rate increase. It was specific, as it was word for word: “The Japanese Government is going to make a fiscal monetary policy decision that is bad for the economy and bad for the market.”
In between receiving this word (Jan 2) and seeing it play out (end of Feb), I continued to pursue reseeding our old investment strategy, believing God would bless that because it was just me in the business now and he knew my heart. I felt God had called me to this company and said he would bless it as a form of ministry. How else could he bless me but energize my business plans? Little did I yet understand!
I took a ministry trip to Uganda with Jackson Senyonga, my Pastor and several other church members. It was mainly to conduct a healing crusade at Uganda’s national football stadium (soccer) which the Chinese had built as part of their silk road infrastructure initiative. It was an amazing time of miraculous healing, including a crippled boy deformed from birth having his bones straightened right before 10000 people’s eyes including mine! What a God we serve!
But I share that trip to share this. I had a dream one night while staying in Kampala. In the dream my grandmother Millie was warning me “you’re baby is at risk of dying!” I felt like the Lord was saying to me that my inheritance was at risk. But how? One thought was my hoped for re-seeding deal with prospect Wesray Capital was at risk. Before the trip I had booked a meeting to explore strategic options with them. The other possibility was that maybe partnering with them was a mistake. I wrestled with the whole thing. Where I settled on it was I’ll meet with them and see if it goes anywhere. Well, after coming back and having that meeting, while they exhibited some interest, nothing further came of it.
But the thing about it was – it was outside of the company’s current investment strategy (hedged US small cap and private equities and convertibles). We had also entertained another strategy (US money flow stock trading), but that was going to be run by another manager. While I had done some investment banking work in Japan (at Morgan Stanley I had been part of advising some of the major Japanese Commercial Banks), I had never contemplated trading in currencies or Japanese equities or options.
It was so specific and so dramatic in its result, I was blown away. Why had God shown me this situation ahead of time? What was I supposed to do with the information? We were not set up to trade on the information, so I instead shared it by email to my Pastor and his wealthy industrialist friend that I had previously been interacting with about possibly investing with us. He immediately recognized the significance of the word and encouraged me to start writing an investment news letter. But I knew that wasn’t the way forward. One thing connected to the news letter comment was his distain for investors always being after “other people’s money.” That stuck with me.
I started getting the idea that God wanted me to refocus my direction in my business to managing God’s money instead of mans. I wasn’t quite sure what that meant or how it could work, but I pressed into the meaning of it.
There was a prophetic woman from California that my Pastor had introduced me to named Jane. Her prophetic track record was very accurate. If you recall she was the one who prophecied to me that something significant was going to happen to me on May 5, 2005 (my back surgery). She also described me as a type of “2” – meaning to multiply. Though several of her prophecies, she kept talking about a “Storehouse of God” being formed here on the earth. That it was connected to the heavenly storehouses. When I would explain what my business at National Hall Capital was (Investment company) she kept talking about – are you sure you are not a “lending” business? These were clues as to what God was showing me to do.
One early morning July 9, 2007 (my birthday) I had a dream with my Dad in it. In my dream, which was highly symbolic, I was travelling with my Dad to Provincetown. On the way he said, I don’t think its going to work out starting a charity. I said, no you don’t understand, it can work. Then Ed, a business friend of mine who does public/private work, wanted to me to sit down with him at the Provincetown PBS station (there is not a PBS station there in real life) and explain why my idea wouldn’t work. He said its OK if the PBS people overhear our conversation because they were the ones who Ed why it wasn’t going to work. Sensing this was an unusual dream, I pondered the meaning of it.
Later that day I met my Dad at the local Catholic church parking lot where I was planning to let the kids ride their bikes. As we were sitting in the back of his SS Trailblazer tailgate, he told me he wanted to talk to me about something. I was like, sure what is it? He said, what if you got a job (on Wall Street) and just waited on the Lord for the seed capital to start the Storehouse? Recognizing immediately that God had prepared my heart from the dream last night to respond, in stead of answering I explained the dream. How I believe God was warning me not to listen to people try and stop me from pursuing what God had shown me to do. That such ideas were not of him, but of the enemy trying to deploy important people in my life to try and stop me by appealing to worldly wisdom. My Dad immediately accepted this explanation and prayed for it to be so.
This was also preparing me for future assaults against the vision from “smart” and “wise” people I loved and trusted, but who didn’t understand what God was asking me to pioneer. This was liken to Joseph’s parents and brothers who mocked him for his dream of ruling one day. Also like David’s brother Eliab who told him he was never going to succeed against Goliath, accusing him of conceit and being wrong. I loved David’s response as I felt was mine too, “Is there not a cause!”