Issue 018 | What Are You Actually Carrying?

(AUDIO VERSION WILL BE AVAILBLE SHORTLY)

September Theme: Architect What You Carry 

A little over a week ago, I stood inside something that had once existed primarily in my cousin’s head.

Pure Raw Worship.

Nearly a year earlier, my cousin Shechaniah came to me with a vision.

She knew what she wanted to create. She knew the kind of worship experience she believed she was called to build. She knew who she wanted in the room. She knew what she wanted people to experience.

And like most visionaries, she could see something that wasn’t there yet.

Not everybody could see it.

But she could.

So when she came to me, I didn’t start by giving her more ideas.

I told her to write down what she already saw.

The vision.

The goals.

What she wanted Pure Raw Worship to become.

Because I have learned something after all these years of building things:

Dreams are good, but what’s written gets done.

She wrote it.

And once I could see what she saw, I could begin helping her determine what needed to surround it.

What needed to happen.

What needed to come first.

What was missing.

What needed to be organized.

What needed to be built.

And on September 4th, we were standing in it.

The people were there.

The worship was happening.

The conversations were happening.

What had once been written on paper was now happening all around us.

And somewhere in the middle of it, I realized something.

I didn’t give Shechaniah the vision.

I didn’t give her what she carried.

That was already there.

I simply helped her put architecture around it.

And that realization has stayed with me.

It is also where I want to begin our September conversation inside Visionary Architect.

This month, we are talking about what it means to:

Architect What You Carry.

But before we can talk about architecture, there is an earlier question.

What are you actually carrying?

The Oil Was Already in the House

I had my own assignment at Pure Raw Worship.

I was there to talk about business.

More specifically, I was talking to people I called oil carriers.

And I came from a familiar passage in 2 Kings 4.

A widow has lost her husband.

Debt is pressing against her household.

Her sons are at risk.

She goes to the prophet Elisha because she needs an answer.

And before he tells her what to do, he asks:

“What do you have in the house?”

Her first answer has always fascinated me.

Essentially—

Nothing.

I have nothing.

Except a little oil.

Except.

Because she did have something.

She just didn’t initially recognize what she had as enough to matter.

And standing at Pure Raw Worship, that scripture began to hit me differently.

Because I had just watched something similar happen right in front of me.

Shechaniah already had something in the house.

She had the vision.

She had years of worship in her.

She had relationships.

She had experience.

She understood something about what she believed was missing and what she wanted to create.

That was already there before I ever entered the picture.

She carried the oil.

I helped architect the vessels.

That line has stayed with me.

Because I think some of us are spending an awful lot of time looking for something new while overlooking what years of living, leading, building, solving, serving and becoming have already put in the house.

When What You Carry Becomes Ordinary to You

I know this personally.

There are things I can walk into and see almost immediately.

Something isn’t working.

Something is missing.

These pieces don’t belong together.

That needs to happen before this.

You don’t need that yet.

This part is going to become a problem later.

For years, I didn’t necessarily think of that as anything extraordinary.

I had been doing it for so long that it simply became the way I thought.

And that is the strange thing about expertise.

After enough years, what once required effort can begin to feel obvious.

What took decades to develop can eventually feel like:

That’s just something I know how to do.

But everybody doesn’t know how to do it.

Sometimes what feels ordinary to you is only ordinary because you have lived with it for so long.

Your judgment.

Your ability to recognize patterns.

Your way of solving a particular kind of problem.

Your ability to make sense of something complicated.

The process you developed because you had to solve the same problem over and over again.

You may have stopped counting it because it has been sitting in your house for years.

But familiar does not mean without value.

Sometimes familiar just means you stopped noticing.

I Have Been Thinking About Value Differently

This has become especially important to me as I continue developing my work in Business Architecture.

Because I’m becoming less interested in starting the conversation with:

What should you sell?

And much more interested in understanding:

What are we actually building around?

That is a different question.

There is a lot of conversation right now about monetizing what you know.

And yes, expertise can have economic value.

I believe that.

I’ve experienced it.

I’ve built businesses around it.

But I also believe we can rush that conversation.

Because recognizing value does not automatically tell us what should be built around it.

Everything you know does not need to become a course.

Every gift does not need to become an offer.

Everything sacred does not need a price attached to it.

And simply discovering that you have valuable expertise does not automatically tell us whether you should consult, coach, teach, speak, write, advise—or build something else entirely.

Those decisions come later.

First, I want to know:

What is actually in the house?

Then Something Happened at the End of Pure Raw Worship

By the time we reached the closing session, I had already taught my Intensive.

My notes were packed away.

My assignment was finished.

Prophetess Kymar Garner stood to deliver the closing message.

She had her own assignment.

Her own message.

And then she announced her subject:

When the Oil Flows.

And she went to 2 Kings.

The widow.

The vessels.

The oil.

I just sat there.

Because now the scripture I had been thinking about, teaching from and seeing differently was meeting me again at the end of the conference through someone who had prepared her message independently of mine.

And I knew I wasn’t leaving Pure Raw Worship with something I had finished teaching.

I was leaving with something I needed to keep thinking about.

The oil never became something different.

It was oil when it sat in the house.

It was oil when the widow barely counted it.

It was oil when Elisha asked about it.

It was oil when the vessels were gathered.

And it was oil when it began to flow.

The oil was already in the house.

What changed was what had been built around it.

There were vessels now.

There was capacity for what she carried to move.

And ultimately, what had been sitting in her house became sufficient to address the financial problem threatening that same house.

I keep coming back to that.

Because maybe the first question isn't always:

What do I need to create?

Maybe sometimes it is:

What have I failed to recognize?

Before You Decide What to Build

I have spent a lot of years helping people build things.

Businesses.

Organizations.

Programs.

Initiatives.

Events.

And now, as I continue developing this next body of work, I find myself increasingly unwilling to begin with the thing we could build.

I want to understand what we're building around first.

Because what you carry and what you build around it are not the same decision.

There are other things we need to understand.

Who is the person who will have to carry what gets built?

Where are they actually trying to go?

What is theirs to carry—and what isn't?

And what value is already there?

Those questions matter.

Because I don't want to help you build something simply because it is possible.

I want what gets built to make sense for the person, the vision and the value it is supposed to sustain.

There will be more to say about that.

But this week, I don't want to rush ahead.

I just want you to look around the house.

The Architect’s Question

What are you actually carrying?

Not what are you planning to launch.

Not what do you wish you had.

Not what could you quickly create.

What have the years put in you?

What can you see now because you have seen it a hundred times before?

What have people repeatedly trusted you to help them understand, solve, navigate or build?

What have you been calling “just something I know how to do” that may actually represent years of developed judgment?

You don't have to decide what to build around it today.

Actually, I would rather you didn't.

Just look around the house.

There may be more oil there than you've been counting.

— Angela

Something New Is Coming to Visionary Architect

Before you go, there is one more thing I want to tell you.

Visionary Architect is getting a room of its own.

Over these past several months, I've realized that I don't want these conversations to simply arrive in your inbox one week and disappear beneath fifty other emails the next.

I want us to have somewhere to keep them.

Somewhere you can come back to previous issues. Read or listen. Sit with an idea again. Ask a question. Join the conversation. And occasionally find a note from me when something isn't quite ready for a full issue but is worth leaving on the Architect's Desk.

So behind the scenes, I am building The Visionary Architect Room—a private home for this publication and the conversations growing around it.

For the next few issues, I am going to continue sending Visionary Architect to everyone on my email list.

But soon, I am going to ask those of you who want to continue reading and listening to raise your hand.

Those readers will receive access to The Room and future issues of Visionary Architect.

So if you've found yourself looking forward to these Monday conversations, if you've been thinking differently because of something we've talked about here, or if you simply know:

Yes, Angela. I want to stay in the room.

You can let me know below.

YES, I WANT TO STAY IN THE ROOM

We're not moving today.

I just want to know who wants to come with me.

I'll tell you more soon.

— Angela