Episode 141 - Finding Our Entrepreneurial Identity with Phil Vischer
Phil Vischer, author, filmmaker, and creator of VeggieTales, shares how the rise and fall of his first “Big Idea” led him to a new understanding of identity and what it means to be rooted in a relationship with Christ.
He challenges faith driven entrepreneurs to consider that God’s call on their lives is much more about walking with Him than it is doing things for Him. Listen in to hear him explain why it’s more important to know your identity is secure in who God is, rather than what you do or your success rate in it.
Episode Transcript
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Phil Vischer: Hey, everybody, at Faith Driven Entrepreneur. This is Phil Vischer.
I have a question for you. Who do you think you are? No really. Who do you think you are?
I want to talk about identity. When we're kids, we're always wondering what am I going to be when I grow up? Who am I going to be when I grow up? Am I going to be an astronaut or am I going to be a cowboy? Am I going to be a racecar driver? What am I going to be? Because that'll tell me who I'm going to be. And we all want to know who we are. We all want to know our identity. So I was a little weird when I was a kid because I grew up in a family of Christian ministry superstars.
My great grandfather was the first nondenominational radio preacher in America. He started a Bible conference in northwest Iowa and I went there every year as a kid. He preached on the radio for 40 years until he died in 1964. And he was friends with Billy Graham. He was friends with Towser and he was friends with all these giants of the faith that very often came to the Bible conference. I saw missionaries from all around the world.
One of my great uncles was the first white man into a whole section of Irian Jaya and literally brought the gospel to cannibals. So between the radio preachers and the missionaries working with cannibals, I saw amazing people doing amazing things.
And so as a kid, the question I was asking myself was, what amazing thing am I going to do?
What would make me an amazing person to like all of these people that I admire? I didn't want to be a missionary. I was too shy to introverted. I didn't want to be a pastor. I didn't really like talking to people very much. I liked playing with puppets. I liked playing with animation. I like playing with computers.
So I kind of wandered my own way backwards, sideways into a brand new occupation, using computers to animate vegetables to tell kids about God. And I just thought, well, this is fun, maybe this is what I do, maybe this is my thing, maybe this is what my grandparents would say, hey, he's one of the good ones. It worked better than I imagined. It kind of took off. And and as veggie tales exploded, my view of my identity started to change. I started to think now everywhere I went, you know, still in my 20s and everywhere I went was, hey, you're the VeggieTales guy, you're the VeggieTales-guy. And I thought, I am I am the VeggieTales-guy. That is who I am. And as it grew even more, I started to expand my own vision for what I could do for God. And it got way bigger. And I decided, sure, it's nice to be the VeggieTales-guy. That's a cool thing.
But what if God wants me to be the next Walt Disney? And what if he wants me to be the Christian Walt Disney? Wouldn't that be fantastic for everyone? And that became my new identity. I am going to be the Christian Walt Disney.
So things are going so great, like everything that I was trying was working. So I invested more money in more people and more projects and we launched all sorts of stuff. And we grew. And we grew. And we grew. And we grew and we grew. And everything was going wonderfully until suddenly it wasn't.
And once when the first things start to go wrong with the thing that you're doing, that's going really well. Your first thought is, well, it'll come back around, it'll come. It's just temporary. It'll come back around God. And if you've spiritualized it, this is something that God wants to have happen. What God can turn it around. God can make it come back and I'll be right back on top again. And he didn't. And it didn't. And I went from in nineteen ninety nine having two thousand two hundred employees and forty million dollars in revenue to 2003, sitting in the back of a bankruptcy court in federal court and watching everything that I had built for God, get packed up in a box and sold at a public auction.
And there I was with my identity, the vegetables guy, the next Walt Disney dead in my hands, just just dead vegetables was gone. I didn't own it anymore.
How could I be the vegetables guy if I didn't even own vegetables? And Walt Disney, I'd lost my animation studio. I had nothing. How I the whole thing, the whole frame of what my identity was, was gone. All I could say was, God, why did you let that happen? You know, didn't you see how hard I was working for you? Didn't you see how much good I was doing for you? The least you could have done was just shown up and helped.
It's really hard when you're young and the first thing you do works really, really well because what you do becomes who you are. I became the vegetables guy. I was going to be the next Walt Disney. That was who I was. And when it was all gone, when I'd lost it all, I was sitting there with nothing, watching everything get carted away to new owners to do new operations of the same characters, but run by new people, not me.
All I was left was God and I didn't know where else to turn. So I turned to God and said, Why? How did you let that happen? Why could you let that happen?
I don't get it. And God said, Did you notice how miserable you were? Did you notice?
There is no joy in what you were doing, you were stressed, you were anxious, you were worried, you were in H.R. meetings when you wanted to be playing with puppets, you were worrying about valuations and bankers. When you wanted to be drawing pictures, you were miserable, chasing an identity I never gave you.
I realized I've been looking for my identity and what I did rather than who I was. I was looking for my identity in the work I was doing for God rather than my relationship with God.
I was trying to figure out why I was so unhappy. In one night in bed, I was reading The Fruit of the Spirit, Paul's letter, and he's listing the fruit of the spirit. And I got through the whole, you know, peace, joy, love kind of thankfulness on and on as a well. Where's. We're stress because I've got that in spades, I've got bushel baskets full of stress, and that does not appear to be on the list of the fruit of the spirit.
So as got unpacked this for me, he showed me that I had made the work I was doing for him more important than my relationship with him. My focus was on the work. Veggie Tales was so important, vegetables was so valuable, vegetables was changing the world. Surely Veggie Tales was more important to God than I was.
And what God showed me when he let it all fall apart. Is that I was actually the one that he cared about, not Bob the tomato and Larry the cucumber, he cared about me.
I realized that not only stress, not a fruit of the spirit, but stress is an amazing warning sign stress.
If you know about the canary in the coal mine. Miners used to carry canaries in small cages in the coal mines because if there was a methane leak or another link of a poisonous gas, canaries were very sensitive and they would stop singing. If if the canary stops singing, you should take that as a warning.
If the canary dropped dead, get the heck out of the coal mine. For me, stress is that canary. What does it tell me? When I'm feeling stress, I'm holding on to outcomes. I'm holding on to my schedule, my budget, my plan, my goals, my vision of my identity. What does God want us to focus on? He doesn't want to focus on outcomes. He wants us to focus on obedience. What God wants me to focus on is what if I asked you to do today and are you doing it? It's just that simple. He doesn't care how far vegetables was going to go. He doesn't care if I was going to build a theme park someday. He cared if I was walking with him. Here's the deal. God doesn't need me.
He doesn't need Bob the tomato. He doesn't need Phil Vitter, and guess what, he doesn't need you either. He doesn't need me. He wants me. Why does he want me? Because he can't make vegetable shells on his own. No, of course not. You can do whatever he wants. He's God. He wants me because he loves me. He doesn't want me to work for him. He wants me to walk with him. And when I'm walking with God, I can take all my plans, my budgets, my goals, my identity, my whatever vision for the whatever future of whatever it is I'm thinking about.
I can take you to the cross, I can nail it to the cross and I can leave it there. I can say, God, this is your business. Your business is outcomes. My business is obedience.
I remember after I lost big idea I was trying to rebuild my career, I sat down with a consultant and the consultant asked the question, where do you want to be in five years? And I thought about it for a while. I realize I didn't know how to answer. I was trying to accept the idea that Christ was Lord of my life. And if Christ is Lord of my life and I actually understand what Lordship is, where I want to be in five years is none of my business. Where I want to be in ten years is none of my business. My business is what is God asked me to do today and am I doing it? And that has as much to do with how I'm treating the girl who's bagging my groceries at the grocery store, as it does with my big world changing ideas over the last couple of years. Got really convicted me to focus on Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want I memorized that sum when I was like five years old on a on a family camping trip. I remember it very well, but it's a pretty poem until you actually read and and understand what it says. The Lord is my shepherd.
I shall not want I shall not need anything. I shall not want for anything. And that just doesn't make any sense. How could I not want for anything?
I need food. I need money. I need a house. I need a family. I need a car. I need a job. I need meaningful.
God is all I need. God was enough for Paul when his ministry was going fantastic and God was enough for Steven when he was being stoned.
God is all we need and not because he can make our plans come true and he can make our identity that we want for ourselves manifest itself.
Amazingly, no, he is all we need because he made us.
So does that mean we don't do good work? No, we do good work. We were created in Christ for good works.
God invites us into good work, not because he needs us, because he wants us. The invitation to walk with him, to work alongside him isn't for his benefit. It is for the shaping of my character and the blessing of the world. It is for joy, my joy and the joy of everyone I come in contact with. We are ambassadors of reconciliation. We are a holy priesthood. We are his hands and feet on earth. Not because he can't do it without us, but because he doesn't want to. Because it brings joy to all of creation when we do it together. So keep an eye on your stress. It is not a fruit of the spirit, but a sign that you're holding on to something that God wants you to let go of.
What are you holding on to today? That God wants you to let go of and pursue your joy?
Bearing good fruit is a joyful experience, even when it's hard. But overall, keep your eyes on your creator. You aren’t working for him. You're walking with him.