I Went to Bible School Looking for God. I Found Alex Hormozi in the Margins.

Part 1 of 2 — five days, one notebook.

Someone in the passenger seat screamed one word. JESUS!

The driver stopped the bus, asking what's the matter. Just then, a truck was coming. Fast — no time to brake, no time to swerve, and would have hit the bus.

The truck missed them completely. Like the collision had never actually been on the calendar at all.

That's not my story. The pastor told it in class on day two, tucked into a lesson about direction and purpose, no big buildup, mentioned like it was a normal Tuesday thing to bring up.

I wrote it down anyway. Same notebook, same pen, right underneath a note about sowing seeds and structuring a business.

Because somewhere in the middle of a five-day Bible course, I stopped being able to tell which page was the sermon and which page was the seminar.

Five Days. Zero Idea What Was Coming.

Word of Faith Bible Institute — WOFBI — Mission to Canada, held right here in Saskatoon at the WINNERS CHAPEL INTERNATIONAL the week of August 17th. I packed a notebook, figured I'd get a refresher on scripture I've half-remembered since Sunday school, and go back to my desk knowing a little more about God.

I did not expect business mentors like Grant Cardone to show up. Or Alex Hormozi. Or Codie A. Sanchez somehow sitting in the back row of a church classroom for five straight days.

Then My Brain Did the Thing It Always Does

By Wednesday I had a second list running in the back of my notebook. Not sermon notes. A tally.

Every time a pastor said something I'd already paid good money to learn somewhere else, I made a mark.

I stopped counting at more than I expected to.

No Seed. No Harvest.

The first mark came before I'd even finished my tea.

Pastor Bolaji was teaching Financial Prosperity, and he wrote a sentence on the board that farmers have known for about as long as there've been farmers: whatever you sow, you will reap.

Then he said the part that stopped me mid-sip.

No seed. No harvest.

Not a metaphor. A rule. You don't get to skip the planting and still expect the field.

Every business coach I've ever paid to listen to has some version of this. Input equals output. Consistency compounds. I know this. I teach some version of this for a living.

But I'd never had it handed to me as a covenant before. Not a strategy — an actual agreement, with a part I'm supposed to play.

The Sentence That Made It Personal

Two pages later, in my own handwriting, I found the line that actually got me.

For my business: keep planting seeds. Keep sharing my business with people. Keep shining the light.

I wrote that mid-lecture, without planning to. It wasn't a note about God. It was a note about Tuesday.

Nobody Walks on Water. Ha.

Somewhere after that, the word faith got redefined for me.

I used to think of it as a Sunday word. Something you either had or didn't, mostly measured by how still you could sit during a long sermon.

Then someone in class said: without faith, you are limited. And next to it, half-joking, I wrote: nobody walks on water. Ha.

Except it isn't really a joke. You don't start a business, hire your first person, propose to someone, or walk into a hard conversation without believing — before there's any proof at all — that your next step is actually going to hold.

Faith requires action. Believing without moving doesn't change anything. You can believe the business will work. Eventually you still have to make the call that proves it, or doesn't.

The Battery vs. The Source

Here's where it actually shifted something.

For years, faith basically meant one thing to me: believe in myself, trust the process, figure it out. Manufacture the confidence from the inside, alone, on a good morning, through sheer will.

That's exhausting. And it has a ceiling — my knowledge is limited, my strength is limited, my experience runs out right when I need it most.

What if it's not just I believe I can figure this out, but I believe I can connect to somewhere bigger than me?

Not a battery running on its own charge. A direct line to the Source of all power in the universe.

That's not a small difference. That's the whole outlet changing.

The Job I Actually Get Paid For

Then came a class on organizational success, and I nearly dropped my pen, because this part is literally my job.

Define the goal. Break it into the objectives it takes to get there. Break those into functional units. Build your structure around them.

Poor administration equals poor results.

I have said some version of that sentence in boardrooms, for money. I did not expect to hear it taught for free, on a Wednesday, in a room with folding chairs.

The Question That Followed Me Home

But the class that actually rearranged something in me wasn't about business at all. It was Pastor Abiodun's session on Divine Direction.

Vision is the unfolding of your future, he said. Not a vague idea. A direction.

Then this: you are not a threat to the devil until you find God's purpose for your life and actually do it.

Most goal-setting talks I've paid for stop at the goal. This one went further. It asked why I was given the ability to reach it in the first place, and what I'm supposed to do with it once I get there.

That was the question I'd actually walked in there needing answered. I just didn't know it yet.

The List in the Margin

By the end of day three, the margin of my notebook had names in it. Not Bible names.

Grant Cardone. Alex Hormozi. Codie Sanchez. People I've paid real money to learn from, whose fingerprints I kept finding on pages written thousands of years before any of them existed.

I'm not saying they got their material from Leviticus. I have no idea where anyone actually gets their ideas.

I'm saying I found the same principles in both rooms, wearing different clothes, over and over, until I lost count.

Next week: what I actually found, one correlation at a time — and the one that had nothing to do with business at all, the reason I feel closer to God right now than I have in years.

— Penny

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