At the end of every podcast, we like to ask our guests to share what God has been teaching them in this season of life. This week’s guest is Liz Bohannon , a speaker, an entrepreneur, and along with her husband Ben Bohannon is the co-founder of Sseko Designs, an international purpose-driven fashion brand creating employment for women across the globe. 

Isaiah 51:7

Hear me, you who know what is right, you people who have taken my instruction to heart: Do not fear the reproach of mere mortals or be terrified by their insults.

Liz: You know, Ben mentioned we have an almost three-year-old. And so it's been a really fun season where we're kind of entering out of those super baby toddler phase and into a phase where our son is really cognitively engaged and asks really good questions and remembers things. And so. I think probably for the last just really few months, I think we've had a new we engaged kind of entering into the season of trying to translate what we believe about him, about God, about other people into terms that a four-year-old can get and understand. 

And it's been a really beautiful process. And I've found probably one of the most beneficial spiritual disciplines that I have experienced in the last. I mean, honestly, I think since I've been a Christian has been how do you translate what you know to be true to something a 3-year-old can understand? 

There's something about that stripping down and getting to the core essence of what we believe in. So that's something that as a family we've been working on for the last really month. We just wrote a family benediction. So this is kind of the thing that the Bohannan family believes and we recite it whether that's on our way to school or before we go to bed at night and kind of going back to scripture then thinking about what are the scriptures that are going to guide us. 

That said, the first line of our benediction is based off of Isaiah 51:7, which says and this is the version from the message which I love, the whole verse says, listen, now you who know right from wrong, you hold my teaching inside of you, pay no attention to insults. And don't let it get you down.

In that first line of our family, dedication,the benediction, is not what I have, what I or what people say. I'm a child of God. And no one can take that away. And we teach it to our 3-year-old and he says it now and it's amazing, but I find myself that it's starting to work its way into my mind. 

And as an entrepreneur, I think it's an incredibly grounding and has been very beneficial to walk into work each day and say, like, I'm not what I do, I'm not what I have. I'm not what other people say. I’m grounding myself in this belief that I am beloved and that I'm created in the divine image of my creator who created me to create. And so I can kind of get out of my ego and insecurity and into doing the work that I was meant to do, whether that's at Sseko, in our family, or in our marriage.

Ben: Yeah. You know, I think probably the clearest thing for Liz and I is really what bleeds into work. And I don't know. This is somewhat of a plug for something else, but we keep getting this as gifts. There's a book called Every Moment Holy.

And it's a book of prayers and it's a liturgy for these kinds of everyday moments. And I would recommend it to anyone, and especially for people that maybe aren't natural prayers. They don't spend a ton of time in prayer, but just need something to kind of walk them through their experiences or help him kind of enter into an experience.

And there's been I would say, we've gone through a fair amount of transition on our team and our office too in Portland over the last several months. And we've had people in and people out and people transition out and had to let people go. 

But amidst all of, there's specifically a prayer that's done. It's like a prayer for companies because it's like prayers for those that employ people. And just being able to read the words of what does it mean? How cool is it that we get to steward these resources and the words given us and that we get to steward somebody's time, that they're with us and we're impacting their life in the time that they're in these four walls. And Liz and I have been commuting to work together, which is another plus of working together as a married couple, being able to kind of read through these prayers and think about how we're essentially praying over our day and our employees as we walk in and we deliver really hard news or we deliver good news some days.

But knowing that we're kind of going into it with the spirit of we're going to be faithful to what the Lord has given us and we're going to honor the time that our employees have given us and the work they put in. But knowing sometimes it doesn't turn out exactly as maybe everyone wants to turn out. And that's like a really challenging thing that we have to wrestle through as believers as we're running these businesses. 

But it's been so comforting to have kind of words to pray through as we go in and prepare for those moments.