I know the book is intentional living and giving.
And I want to dive deeper into that because I know you just also mentioned that
you were considering you're actually marketing on that.
And I'm sure that's a lot of a lot of time consuming.
Marketing is just not easy in general.
You've just got to stay with it.
You know, nothing happens by itself.
So that's just, you know, I do that.
I have a web, you know, I'm upgrading the web pages with my guy.
I mean, there's just stuff going on all the time.
Yeah, we had a church in our city burned down to a week and a half ago.
And now we're trying to get that congregation to use our facility while
they're trying to decide what to do.
So I got to write up a covenant of understanding.
Well, that's one more thing I didn't know I was going to do at noon yesterday,
but we need to have it in writing so that, you know, it's if it's not in writing,
it does not exist.
It's been my model for years.
So I'm I've said, OK, I'll sit down and write up a memorandum or a covenant of
understanding with the the pastor that's going to use the church.
He's got a congregation of maybe 50 to 60 people.
But the entire building burned to the ground.
It's an old historic building.
And they were it they didn't own it, but they were using it under the auspices
of another Christian organization.
But, you know, that kind of stuff, I never I'm thinking, OK, I wasn't planning on
doing that today. And I love it.
And, you know, the more that you do outside of the book, the more it seems like
now you have to, like you said, update the website, go back into the marketing piece.
And so just for the audience who sees this, I'm Jovanka McGee, co-host of
Vision Pros Live. And I'm with Larry O'Nan.
Please tell me the name of your book and where you're located again.
Well, I'm from Southern California right now.
I've been lived out here long enough.
There my kids call California home.
I was originally born and raised in western Colorado.
So I'm a Colorado Rockies kid.
I mean, University of Colorado graduate, go Buffalo's, you know, all that kind of stuff.
But that was way back in the dark ages in the late 60s and then into the early 70s.
I lived in the eastern part of the United States in the Philadelphia area.
But I've been in California since 1970.
So when all my grandkids and my kids are born out here, I might as well call it home.
I know. And, you know, a part of my well, my childhood and some of my adulthood
was in Colorado, born and raised in Denver, Colorado.
And I have two children that were born there and then two children that were born here
in San Antonio, Texas. But Colorado will always be home for me.
There's a beauty about that place is you can't get out of your system.
You can not.
You can. Yeah, it's really great.
No, it was years ago.
I went to the University of Colorado, was majoring in theater arts, and I knew I was
going to become a famous guy on Broadway or New York.
I didn't know which. But I'd never been to New York.
I'd gone as far east as Denver, Colorado.
So you could tell I really had a huge expanse of the United States,
Western Colorado, Western United States.
I knew quite a bit about. But my journey took me into Philadelphia of all places.
When I told them told I was going to be working in Philadelphia, I didn't know if it was a city
or a state. I just felt place east. Yeah.
And I learned a lot. I mean, that's the you know, the city of brotherly love.
And I lived in right downtown Philadelphia and worked at the University of Pennsylvania
for a while. That is awesome.
Way back. But, you know, I got, you know, I don't get back there too often anymore,
but I have a few interesting experiences from that part of the country.
Larry, I don't know why coming on here.
I feel like I'm just speaking to a friend I haven't seen in a while.
And then I was sitting here like, am I?
Yeah, like Larry Onan is a friend.
Hey, I mean, it just feels so comfortable speaking with you.
You have a wealth of knowledge and just your your lifespan and all the stories
that you've shared with me is so intriguing that I get caught up in it.
But let's go ahead to your book.
Your book Intentional Living and Giving was published recently when it was aimed
at the younger generation.
What inspired you to focus on this demographic?
Well, I initially came up with the concepts of that book over 45 years ago.
And I was assigned actually to figure out what lifestyle stewardship was
by a group of people that were leaders of the organization I was with.
I was in a meeting and they were hearing a presentation of how they were going to
raise significant new capital funding.
And the consultants at that time were very insistent that if they did as the
organization I was with did not begin to teach lifestyle stewardship, we were going
to create animosity and competition with other Christian nonprofit organizations.
And the organization didn't want to do that, but they sure didn't want to start
another ministry.
And the consultants were pretty firm if you can raise significant resources.
They were aiming for a billion dollars in income over a period of time.
And they said the problem is not the amount of money, but the problem is you
want to do it in a collaborative way where other people are blessed.
And if you're just out raising money, they're going to see you as taking their
money.
But they said if you start teaching a stewardship that's much broader than what
is historically been taught, it could help everybody.
And I was in the meeting.
I've been quite successful in the last few years of what I was doing, but I was
a nobody in the room.
I was just there for I was riding along.
I was a young kid at 32 years of age.
And the discussion was going on and the consultants were pretty firm.
And so somebody said, well, let's assign that off to Larry and let him look into
that matter.
Now, that was really a ploy to get off a topic.
Yes.
But I put it down as a serious responsibility.
I have a high responsibility factor in my life.
So I wrote down, figure out what lifestyle stewardship really is.
And then at the bottom of that page on blank sheet of paper, I wrote down, you've
got the freedom to fail because I had no idea what I was going to be doing with
this.
I didn't know what the responsibility would imply.
And the meeting went on, they got into other topics, but my assignment was to
take on this topic.
And about two or three weeks later, I got a team of guys together and I said, we
need to get serious and figure this out.
I don't even know what word stewardship really means.
You know, I'd been raised in a preacher's family all my life.
I'd always heard about stewardship and tithing and that kind of stuff.
So the terms didn't mean we're not terribly clear.
It was language that we used, but nobody knew what was meant by it.
So when you hear the word stewardship, almost everybody thinks about money.
Okay.
This is the money pitched from the church is going to come on stewardship Sunday.
And the pastor is going to speak three or four times a year on it because he's
got to talk about money once in a while.
There is nothing more than the truth.
Then stewardship has really very little to do about money.
The word steward means the one that's not going to be used.
It means the one that's managing the affairs of somebody else.
That's all that it means.
It's a stewardship.
So if you're in an airplane and you have these delightful ladies and men walking
up and down the aisle, they're stewards or stewardesses.
What they're doing is they're managing on behalf of a Delta or United or American
or whatever the brand is, they're managing the security of that airplane
while it's in the air.
They know how to spot bad people and good people and smile at you at the same time
they give you a coke.
So, but that is a steward.
They are there not just to be nice to you, but they're there on behalf of somebody
else to secure the intentions of that objective of flying an airplane.
And if you go back even into a couple of hundred years ago, the steward back in
the, we call the dark ages was the one that was managed in the affairs of the estate
manager.
They did the finances.
They oversaw all the, uh, the personnel.
They took care of the property.
So any landlord had stewards working for him to take care of this stuff.
And that's the same idea that you find in scripture, but I didn't know that.
I just thought stewardship men.
Okay.
They're going to ask me for money.
Better hold on to my wallet, you know, type of thing.
But I got into that and I really, the book itself, intentional living and giving is
outlining the principles that we learned way back then.
And I have taught for many years globally as I've done consulting with many
nonprofit organizations, but I wrote the book so that the alpha generation, the Z
generation, the younger crowd who probably is as ignorant of what stewardship means
as I was can reconnect and jumpstart themselves into living a life that's
thriving rather than a life of defeat and frustration.
Because if you think everything is yours, then everything has fallen apart.
It's your fault.
It's somebody else's fault.
We live in a pretty compressed and deep depressed environment.
And I was in Ireland a while back, about three years ago.
And I heard a group of from your team of people I was working with.
And they were saying, we just don't find any information that's in writing that
helps people really understand what we're learning.
And I came back and I said, I better dust off the notes.
I better dust off my book in the eighties and I need to get this back out for a new
generation to understand.
So living and giving is just really about the words on the front of that cover.
Number one, it's got to be intentional.
You don't fly through life on the seat of your pants and life is living and giving.
And then we unpack what that all means and you get into the book.
And with that being said, yes, I know that in this day and age, in our political
environment, in our economic environment, we have been trained to think that life is
about us and life is not about us.
We are stewards of the king.
When you look into scripture, and this has got a scriptural basis to it, you go back
into Genesis, the second chapter, and you find that God placed Adam and Eve in a
garden of Eden to take care of his stuff.
Yes, we came on the scene with a job description.
Now, Adam and Eve both blew it because they were preoccupied by selfishness.
But, and so when you look at the story of the fall of man, as we call it, you see man
drifting from what God intended man to do.
And if I am a steward, then I'm a steward for everything.
Absolutely.
My time, my talent, my treasure.
I don't own a house.
I don't own a car.
I don't own clothes.
Everything I've got, I'm stewarding for somebody else.
Now, the state of California thinks they tax me and they charge me money and that
kind of stuff.
Yes, there is an assignment from a duality of government that says, you know,
you are responsible for this and we're going to tax you for it.
But in reality, I don't own anything.
And when I started to realize everything I have, even when it comes to the green
New Deal, as we all hear about up there, you know, the whole area of taking care of
God's creation.
And naturally, if you're really going to take care of it, you're going to pick up
after yourself.
You're not going to throw stuff out the car window.
You're not going to leave trash laying around.
You're going to be sensitive to how many times you drive through the car.
Many times you drive across town because it does use up fuel.
Yeah, but it's not the extreme side.
It's just being a good steward.
Yeah, yeah.
And then you know, and so with the book, what new insights or lessons have you
learned since publishing the book that you'd like to share with anyone?
I know it was in June, but hey, we're already in September and it's almost the
end of the year.
You know, as I started the book, I had books available back in March of this
year.
Okay.
And when the book started coming out, it was interesting.
I didn't know who was going to be the one that was interested.
And I went to a men's breakfast.
I was speaker there that morning and there was probably six or eight guys that
bought books at the end of my speaking.
And I was amazed how they started telling me where they were in the book.
Now, I normally you think about this book, it's women and men, but in this
particular case, it was three different guys independent of each other kept
coming to me and say, I'm in chapter so-and-so.
I read this illustration.
I'm learning this.
I'm taking my time to do the little exercises at the end of the chapter.
And I thought, you know, this could be a very valuable tool for men that are
confused.
Women typically pick up on books and they like to read and they are wanting
to be inspired.
I don't find too many guys that like to read and be inspired, but in this
particular case, it's been very interesting to hear people say, I really
learned something I never thought about before over here when you gave this
story and you did this.
The book is full of stories, but the book is also full of principles.
And what I did, Jabonka, I read the book and I was like, I'm going to
read it, Jabonka, I wrote the book in a design where the first nine chapters
are dealing with the meat of what I would call the theology of stewardship.
Theology, I'm not trying to be religious per se on it, but it's the core values
of what makes up the principles.
The latter half of the book is how do you apply these to everyday living from
life to life to life to life?
Because I think we sometimes get concepts in our brain, but we don't know
how to make them work in our life.
And I've found people in the last few months of saying what was really helpful
because I see even my life differently today because not of the principle, but
just how to apply it.
That's what we're talking about here.
So intentional living and giving is like a guidebook to help you live a
victorious, thriving life.
And it's not full of great secrets.
I think it is bringing five key principles together that independently you may think
they don't tie together.
But when you see all five of them working, it's like, okay, my hand is five fingers.
My hand is not just my thumb.
And we sometimes think of life as, okay, I got that principle down, but we don't
function with a thumb.
We function because the whole hand works together.
And God's principle of stewardship is around five core principles.
And that's what's outlined.
And then how do you make those principles work in your life?
Absolutely.
So what are one or two key principles from that book that you'd like to share?
Okay.
I'll just take a couple of them here.
I think the first one is what every person that's ever been in a faith
community has heard about.
God owns it all. And we think, well, God does that, but he's sure not involved very
much.
I mean, the tendency is to be religious and not be really personal in it.
But when you look at scripture, you find that there's not a thing that he's ever
given anybody.
He talks about giving in the sense of he's transferred responsibility, but he's
not saying this is yours and this no longer mine.
I know when King David was raising the money for the temple in the Old Testament,
he was never going to build the temple, but he raised the funding so his son
could build it.
And he has a prayer in there that says, yours, O Lord, is everything.
You own everything and heaven and earth is yours.
We are just here to serve you.
I think many times people don't realize we forget that we're not the only ones
who own everything.
We forget that he owns it all and we don't have anything.
But the second principle is that God is a giver because he gave his creation.
He gave Adam and Eve.
Everything about him is giving.
It's a thread throughout the entire scripture that he's a giver.
And God wants us to be givers as well.
One little famous verse I learned when I was a kid.
It was a simple little verse for Sunday school days, way back in the dark ages.
But I never knew what the word cheerful meant.
Yeah, I thought it meant laughs and joy and ho ho ho.
This is really fun.
But that's not the word that's in the scripture.
The word is a Greek word that's hilarious.
And hilarious is the basis of the word that means to cause to shine like the sun.
Yes.
Now how in the world is going to cause to shine like the sun have anything to do with
being cheerful?
Well, it was an English translation way back in the King James Version that came up with
cheerfulness.
But to cause to shine like the sun says the sun's got one purpose.
Give off heat, give off light.
It's a ball of gas.
It's not a planet like we have.
Yes.
And just as the sun is designed to give off heat and give off light, we are designed to
be givers from the one that provided for us in the first place.
Yeah.
So God loves a hilarious giver.
Yes.
Really hilariously because they're doing the very thing that God created them to do.
And I think many people are trying to take rather than give.
And every time you're trying to take anything and become possessive on that dictator outcome,
it's just going to create problems.
God loves a cheerful giver.
He wants us to learn to give like he gave.
Yeah.
And what I like hearing about that, Larry, is the fact that people here give and money
monetary, right?
It's always it's never giving your time or it's rarely won't say never, but it's rarely
about things that you really have control over and you make a conscious decision to
be intentional about doing that.
And like you said, to be cheerful is shining like the sun and giving off, you know, a brightness
and yes, simply just saying hello or simply loving unconditionally without finding out
the story.
Right.
Because that's what God has done for us.
And so I think that those are two great points that I enjoy hearing about because giving
is so much more than just monetary.
There was years ago, I taught a class and I asked him, I want to do some these were young
adults, couples.
And I said, I need your help.
I want to figure out how many things we can give in the next 25 minutes.
And so I put it in groups and I put them to work.
And I said, can we come up with 100 different things to give without ever mentioning money?
Because it's a given money can be given.
In fact, the Old Testament, when when God was declaring through to the children of Israel,
the principles of giving, he was calling it the tithe at the time.
And the tithe is 10 percent of income.
And there's a whole story to get into.
And God said, I'm not giving you this principle because I need money.
Yeah.
I'm giving this principle to you because you need to keep me first in all things.
And when you transfer, that's this money part, because it's a very tangible thing.
We can see money go, we can count it, we can do things with it.
But there's at least 100 things that anybody in this world can be giving every single day.
And sometimes it's the next door listening to the next door neighbor when you don't have
time.
Absolutely.
It's sometimes mowing somebody's lawn.
It's sometimes taking person across town.
It's going to take you time and some gasoline to do that.
You know, we need to be looking at how many things can we give and what do we have to
give?
People say, I don't have anything to give.
What they're really saying to me is I don't have any money right now.
Yes, yes.
Well, that is, oh, yeah, you have plenty to give and I don't want your money.
Yes, yes, yes.
So can I help you become a giver the way God's a giver?
And then yes, money is going to come along the picture.
I dedicated one whole chapter out of 17 chapters about money, because everybody is going to
think a book that's got the word stewardship in it someplace must be about money.
Okay.
Yes.
So the principles of using money in scripture, but that was never the intention of the book.
Ironically, if I go into a Christian bookstore or a bookstore, you name whatever Barnes and
Noble or anyplace else, they're going to probably put this book over into the money section
section because they don't know what it means themselves.
They're just parking it.
They do not think about it being lifestyle of anything.
And that's really what this is all about.
So I'm all I just want people that I feel like in this day and age, we have people that
are confused.
They don't know what they're here for.
Suicide is up because we don't know our value.
We don't know our purpose.
And we think it's better to get out of the way than do that to live a life.
It's a really sad plight.
Confusion, defeat, fear are all over the place.
We're being told that if we don't vote a certain way, hell's going to break loose and XYZ
is going to happen on both sides.
There's consequences to our decisions.
I understand that.
But that doesn't mean that we should be living in depression over those.
We should say, God's sovereignty gave me what I've got.
What do I do with it?
So it could be today, one of my responsibilities in the next eight weeks is listen and vote
correctly because I'm a steward and I've got some responsibility here.
Absolutely.
But that has nothing to do with politics.
It has to do with I've been given a privilege to voice my opinion.
God wants to hear me talk.
God wants me to ask.
Yes, yes.
So one of my principles is God wants me to ask.
He really wants me to ask others and he wants me to ask him.
We think of asking and then we think, oh, that must be the holy thing of prayer.
Well, that is a key part.
But sometimes I know this morning I needed something from a secretary in the town here
and I wrote her a text message.
Now, she would never have sent me the information unless I'd asked her for it because she didn't
really needed it.
Yes.
I sent the text message and I know by the time we're finished talking today, I'll have
a text back that answers the question I asked.
Why am I frustrated with her if I'm not going to be asking her for what I need?
Absolutely.
It's people to people.
It comes from God.
I believe it gets God to people and people to people.
And that's the way we design our system to work.
And just to be enjoying the process, thriving rather than living in defeat, whatever your
position is.
I love it, Larry.
You may have millions of dollars or you may have two cents as the widow did it.
The widow's my story.
The amount of what you have is not relevant.
It is are you getting what God's already entrusted to you right now?
And that's the intentional part.
What can I do today to give myself to help the lives of other people or to help advance
the causes I believe in or whatever it is?
So I'm just a really I know that people will be freed up if they get into the book because
it's really a handbook to know, OK, how do I live today?
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward.
It's going to get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.