The birth of a calling can seem mysterious because God’s ways are just that. As you’re finding your calling, you don’t have the privilege of looking back and seeing how it all connects. In this ongoing series of blogs, you will get a glimpse into this process and what we’ve learned about leadership, organizational development, faith, resiliency, and life’s journey.

The original “nudge” occurred in late 2017, and it’s since evolved into what’s now a division of BONSAI. While BONSAI is our calling to help leaders, organizations, and students contribute at their highest levels in work that fulfills their purpose, TakeFlight has an even more focused direction: to launch organizations, churches, and marriages in boldly leveraging their strengths to achieve their God-given destinies.

Joy in the Work

In less than a year, our efforts have included:

  • Developing Revealing Hidden Shackles, an innovative, four-session curriculum for small groups that examines domestic violence within the Christian community (in partnership with Dennis McFadden, Executive Pastor of Care at Shoreline Church in Monterey, California). Revealing Hidden Shackles will be in pilot phase this summer.
  • Delivering training to help couples develop mission statements to launch them on more intentional journeys in their marriages.
  • Providing strengths coaching to leaders of churches and organizations growing and bearing fruit.
  • Launching a nonprofit’s new board of directors to re-engage the organization.
  • Starting a Facebook Group called “TakeFlight” to help people figure out how to live out their faith at work and in business. We would love for you to join us!

We plan to add to this list and dive deeper into each of these areas.

‘For Such a Time Is This’

When Dennis and I first started working together on Embracing Hidden Shackles, I asked: “Why me?” In his wisdom (and with a big grin on his face), he replied: “Why not you?” More on that story later, but here are two key principles that impacted the formulation of TakeFlight: (They were taught to us by Dr. Tony Evans for whom we’re grateful.)

1. Let God’s blessings flow through you, not to you. Patrick and I have been blessed with many talents, gifts, experiences (good and bad), relationships, etc., and we want to use these to help others.

2. When your past preparation is aligned with your current ability to influence, you’re ready to move toward your God-given destiny. We can look back and see how our journey and our current environment have prepared us for this mission. We see this as an opportunity to continue to help companies while also applying business principles to marriages, churches, and ministries.

What’s Next?

We’ll continue to press on with BONSAI while also cultivating TakeFlight. We’re seeding TakeFlight with our own funds, which has eliminated the suspicion of hidden agendas. People can clearly see that no one else is controlling our actions.

We hope that as you walk this journey with us, you will be inspired and motivated to more boldly find and pursue your calling — and that you’ll learn from both our mistakes and triumphs as we desire to also learn from you.

Warmly,
Loriana and Patrick

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    Loriana Sekarski is founder and president of BONSAI, a consulting company that transforms leaders (and businesses) into the best version of themselves. As a leadership coach, Loriana teaches leaders how to hone soft skills, spur workplace engagement, and achieve untapped levels of potential. Outside of BONSAI, Loriana serves as an adjunct professor at Washington University’s graduate student program. Additionally, she's fine-tuning her passion project, TakeFlight, a division of BONSAI that launches organizations, churches, and marriages to boldly live out their purpose by leveraging their strengths to achieve their God-given destiny. TakeFlight has just developed Revealing Hidden Shackles, an innovative curriculum that examines domestic violence within the Christian community.