The pitch…

This bliss!

This Trinitarian dance!

This entwinement with love!

This holy union and oneness!

No longer orphaned or abandoned, but abiding in this garden of intimacy and rest… every promise fulfilled!

Whole, well, and at peace with springs of living water bubbling up from within! Limitless and abounding!

My very own special unique place of bliss…

I am a salesman. That’s how I made my living. And when I am sold, it’s generally easy to convince somebody to trust what I believe to be true. It’s easy to sell somebody something I know they need, want, and can’t afford to live without; especially when I have the confidence that it delivers.

I know how sales work; it’s generally a heart connection built around trust.

And I’m an easy mark for somebody who is contagious in what they believe to be true about the product they are representing.

As a young salesman, I bought into my share of scams, but with age and experience, I became a cynic. Trust is a steeper climb at my age. I can usually read a scam intuitively. I now generally distrust salesmen. And I generally distrust preachers. I’ve experienced my share of shysters.

Try selling something to a culture steeped in distrust. A few years back, I lived in the cultural melting pot of DC for a year or so, and I knew instinctively, when I walked into their space and was face to face, the amount of distrust and skepticism I would be faced with in order to walk away with an order in my hand. But I was quite comfortable with my product, capable of reading the room, and I also had enough experience to know where the starting price needed to be in order for it to be a win, win.

Life is Tricky and complicated. And selling somebody who knows me from the inside out, like my wife, or my family, shouldn’t be, but can still be a tall order. Sometimes I want to scoop up everybody I know and transport them into this blissful union. But I have learned that this union isn’t something I have the ability to sell. It is such a precious place that is unique to every person in my sphere of influence. But everyone, including my family, needs room to come into their own unique place of intimacy with the Abba of Jesus. I can’t coerce, push, manipulate, or force anyone to drink. As a father, I am learning that I have to take my hands off. That’s what a good father does. His job is not as a salesman but as a cheerleader.

Having discovered this place of bliss, I want to take everyone I know with me.

But that is a false premise. My story is mine alone, and my unique place of wonder and transformation wasn’t designed for you. You wouldn’t be happy in my abiding place…

There’s a big difference between heartburn and a burning heart. On the road to Emmaus, those two fellas used the phrase, “Did not our hearts burn within us.”

Being sold a religious bill of goods will give you heartburn. Because your heart knows what only your heart can know, and instinctively, we all can read a scam.

When Jesus said, I am going to prepare a place for you, so that where I am there, you may be also. He wasn’t talking about a corporate y’all. This was an individually peculiar place designed, especially for you, a place with your name and identity on it. Not a Church, a mansion, or a place somewhere in the future. He prepared a peculiar place next to his heart. And when you enter that place next to his heart, that’s when you feel the sensation of a burning heart.

It’s a place only you can enter. No other person on the planet can go there except you. It’s a unique and special place where you alone experience the bliss, of knowing, as you have always been known, the place of a burning heart. And the place from which you can be, as you have always been. From his perspective, of course! And it’s a safe place. The only place on this planet uniquely your own. You can’t buy it. It’s not something you can be sold. But it’s real, authentic, and full of glory!

Have I sold you yet?

Lloyd Clark is an entrepreneur, a former pastor, and a writer. He is passionate about being loved by our Heavenly Father and revealing that same love to everyone he meets. He and his wife, Mary have five children and seven grandchildren and live in North Carolina.