Especially in the New Year, we’re all looking for more order and impact in our lives. To help us, rēp alum and organizing expert Vicki Norris of Restoring Order®, shares her story about God restoring natural, spiritual and Kingdom order in her own household. This process equipped Vicki and her husband, Trevor, to step into their mandate to return this broken world to Original Order.
FROM: Doing Business “For God”
I started Restoring Order in 1999 as an organizing consulting practice. God’s favor was evident immediately and our impact spread - I began speaking publically and became the organizing expert on a local TV show for seven years. HGTV “discovered” me and invited me to be on one of TV’s most popular shows at the time ‘Mission: Organization’. And in 2005, Harvest House publishers offered me a two book deal.
In 2006, my husband Trevor and I had our first son, Nash. At that moment, Trevor and I stepped into what really was the first call we perceived on our lives: for Trevor to stay home with our child(ren) and for me to continue growing Restoring Order. In 2007, all was going according to plan – I was writing my second book, pregnant with our second son, our P&L was the best ever, and yet I began to feel stuck. I wanted to really go for it and create an empire. I thought to myself at the time, “Move over Martha [Stewart], Vicki’s coming up because God wants His people at the top!” I had achieved a lot but I knew that “a plan without many advisors fails,” and I felt I had reached critical mass with what I knew how to do.
So, I hired advisors for strategic planning, public relations, and an agent to help me break through. Six months down the road and $75,000 later, I was no further ahead and I was in a lot of pain. I was mad and didn’t understand. I had a lot of frustration and pain towards God, “I’m a woman who wants to do right by you, glorify Your Name and run an excellent business and this is what I get? I am doing this for you!!” I really thought I had done everything God could expect of me. Pain makes our hearing very acute, and I began to stalk God on why this had happened.
TO: Administrating His Business
In Fall 2009, I began my Kingdom journey when I took Patrice Tsague’s Biblical Entrepreneurship (BE) course. Throughout the materials I heard – for the first time- the phrase “The Kingdom of God” over and over. It was like God was highlighting the phrase in yellow. Wasn’t that heaven? I wasn’t sure, but I had to find out.
In January 2010, the Lord very clearly said to me “I’m bringing you back to my bride”. Immediately, I expanded from teaching about natural order into preaching and teaching natural, spiritual and Kingdom order. That’s the key - God is a God of order.
Over these last 3 years since our own awakening, Trevor and I discovered our hunger to see God’s original intent restored not only in households and businesses, but also in the financial, health, and spiritual realm. We want people to experience the supernatural life, living a radical life on the edge by listening and doing what God says. For Restoring Order, listening and doing has become a daily practice.
For instance, two years ago, we were struggling to reactivate our clients. God showed me a strategy for creating a short term retainer system called the “Organizing Club”. Not only did it work, now 66% of our business is recurring! Another time, I had a vision of our Client Services Manager going down into a mine shaft with a spoon and a pair of tweezers. God was trying to tell us she had the wrong tools to “mine” our database, using only the phone and email. Upon further inquiry, He led us to create an inspirational postcard campaign (using our database) when everyone else was departing from direct mail. The postcards made their way into people’s homes and consciousness when we physically could not. So many were blessed – they used them as bookmarks, posted on their refrigerator… some even called our office crying. And, to top it off, we could trace an entire month’s worth of business to that idea.
AND: Embracing Our Family Mandate
To step into our calling, we’ve had to do some crazy things [by the world’s standards] to “restore order” in our own lives. The Lord asked us to stop trusting the stock market with His money, so we closed our account and waited to hear from the Lord. Most people would say that’s not wisdom. But we knew that He has appointed our property to be an apostolic resource center and was leading us. We have a barn that holds about 100 people. We’re teaching people how to live in God’s original intent (we call it “Garden Living”) and helping them break out of the world’s patterns (Romans 12:2). As we teach, we’re beginning to see signs, wonders, healings and people filled with the Spirit. So, we’ve used the money as the Spirit has led, to make improvements to our property and will use it to produce an income. And God keeps blessing us with more. We’ve begun doing more large-scale events and we were always renting bathrooms. So, one of the improvements we made was adding bathrooms. Who knew that the abundant life might include flushing our savings down the toilet!
God also continues to change our thinking about our family mandate. He had been speaking to us already, but confirmed through rēp, that we weren’t fully integrated: Trevor took care of the kids and I ran the business. But now, we’re in what we call “misness” (ministry / business) and operating like a household together. The more we operate as one and in righteousness, the more we accelerate. We don’t want to just wake-up God’s people to the Kingdom and then let them hit the “snooze button” and return to life as usual; we want to disciple them into radical, victorious living together.
The rēp community has modeled what we’ve begun to do here. We have to lay our lives down for one another – first as husband and wife and then as a community. We’re fighting the giants of entitlement, aloneness, and religion, so we need to equip our household and walk with them over time. Being aware of kairos vs. chronos time has also been huge – we’re in lifelong and lasting relationships to encourage and recognize the greatness in one another.
Trevor and I are thankful to Brett and Lyn and the entire rēp community for being the true Body. We needed to know we were not alone up here in Oregon emerging into this nutty Kingdom life. The Johnsons and the rēp program have been spiritual midwives for our family, helping us be birthed into our destiny.
Connect with Vicki and Trevor at www.RestoringOrder.com for Organizing Services, Speaking & Training, Workshops or Organizing Products & Resources. Or sign-up for their free E-Newsletter!