Sometimes we stare so long at a door that is closing that we see too late the one that is open.
                                                                - Alexander Graham Bell

One afternoon in the fall of 1986 I discusssed my idea of launching a newsletter with my wife. After about an hour and a half we agreed we should pray about it, so we did. When we finished praying, the phone rang. It was a friend who I had not spoken with in several years, and didn’t know how to find — he was the former news editor at Christianity Today, and the person I most wanted to be the editor for my newsletter.

The timing of his phone call seemed like a clear indication we were on the right track, so we launched the publication. However, within a year we found ourselves in deep debt, and the newsletter was such a drain on the rest of our business that we were forced to sell a lot of our possessions – our home, office building, boat, and one of our cars — to pay off our debt and keep our business going.

Shortly after making those hard decisions, the rest of our business turned around and was profitable again. But the newsletter continued to lose money for almost ten years. We invested far more into it than it would ever return, but we believed we should continue to do it.

By the mid 1990s, we faced a new financial crisis. Paper prices were climbing every month at an astronomical rate. If we continued as we were, without making a major change, our whole business would soon fold. I tried everything I could think of to increase income, reduce expenses and stop the loses. Finally, after agonizing over the decision, I prayed again, drove to my office, and told my staff we were folding the newsletter. I laid off several good people who had worked very hard and served me faithfully.

It was a hard decision. A door was closing. One we had loved doing. But in hind sight, it was the right thing to do.

The people we laid off found great jobs in other organizations. And because we had started publishing our news electronically on the Internet, our subscriber base grew from 8,000 to more than 100,000 — without the cost of printing and postage.

Our e-newsletter served as a launch pad for the rest of our Internet publishing venture, which grew dramatically in the last half of the 1990s — and was one of the few profitable dot-coms in those early days of the Internet.

The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.     – Proverbs 27:12