Trust Me. Prepare. A Kingdom Business Architect’s Journey from Fear to Trust

Before Gail Root left her business for six weeks, she was afraid. She had never been away that long. Her mind ran through the questions: “What are my clients going to think? Am I going to let people down? Am I going to drop the ball? Is my whole business going to tank?”

At the same time, part of her was certain. She knew “with full faith in my whole heart” that the time away was “a blessing from God’s hand.” Both were true at once. “Like the split,” she told me, unprompted. “I think of you a lot.”

Two words kept coming back to her: trust me and prepare.

To understand why those words mattered, it helps to go back almost a decade, to a day at her desk when she was 50.

A Believer Keeping a Checklist

Gail was working two jobs, raising three teenage boys, and dealing with three different health issues. Life was very full, and she was doing her best to manage it all. “I was a believer for a long time before this encounter,” she says.

That day, she cried out at the Lord in anger. “Hello, do you see me? Do you see everything I’m trying to do here?” Her thinking then was simple: “If I do good, I shouldn’t be experiencing this, right? I’ve earned my way out of this, Lord.”

What she heard back was not what she expected: The anxiety you’re feeling, Gail, is self-induced. Back then, she says, “I was addicted to busy. I wore it like a badge of honor.” Beneath the busyness was a belief: “I was just living in performance and anxiety, thinking that I needed to prove I was worthy of his love.” She describes a life lived by a checklist:

“Am I being a good mother? Check. Am I being a good wife? Check. Am I going to church? Check. Am I tithing? Check. Am I going to Bible study? Check. It was all about me.”

Then came what she calls “a really deep emotional experience with the Holy Spirit.” Until then, she says, she hadn’t had a real relationship with the Holy Spirit. If someone had told her that one day she would coach Christian women, pray out loud, and quote Scripture, she would have said, “You have the wrong Gail.”

She doesn’t look back on that woman with scorn. “If they knew better, they’d do better,” she says. “I really didn’t know better.”

The Chair at 5:30

The invitation was simple: seek me first. Gail took it literally. Her youngest got up for school at 6:30, so she got up at 5:30, sat in her chair, and surrendered her day, her thoughts, and her agenda before the day could take them. Left to herself, she says, she would have gone straight to the checklist and the control: “What do I have to do? When do I have to?”

“It was creating so much anxiety,” she says. “And the Lord just said, This is not how we live.”

Matthew 6:33 became her life verse. It had once been a comforting scripture, but now she heard it differently. “Well, no, he means for me, literally.”

“He gets Gail first. … Not me reading scripture to check the box, not me completing a Bible study to check the box. … He gets my heart.”

“My anxiety started waning. I started hearing his voice. I started experiencing the peace. I started having courage,” she says. That courage included saying yes to things she would never have attempted. That morning practice eventually became her book, Master Your Morning and Change Everything, a six-step practice of intimacy with Jesus.

Not Jesus as CEO

When Gail began teaching those six steps, her Facebook ads said, “Make Jesus your CEO.” Something about the line bothered her. “I didn’t believe Jesus really wanted to be the CEO of our business,” she says. “He gave us the business to lead it. Who else is supposed to be the CEO of our business if it’s not us?”

She came to see Jesus as more like “chairman of the board,” a partner who yokes with us, while the chief executive is the hands-on one. Putting everything on him, she says, felt like “dismissing responsibility.” She says it differently now:

“Lord, you’ve called me to be the CEO of my business and I can’t do it without you.”

She is gracious about the other view. “Words are powerful,” she says, and someone could make a scriptural case for it. For her, the change took time. It was “an evolution.”

Trusting God didn’t mean stepping away from responsibility. She was still responsible for leading the business He had given her.

How an Architect Is Made

Today, Gail calls herself a Kingdom Business Architect. She helps Christian coaches, primarily women in the second half of life, rebuild their businesses on a solid foundation so they can “love their life and their business now, not someday.”

She never set out to become an architect. The word felt foreign when it first came up. She began in direct sales and network marketing, helping women run their businesses from a Kingdom perspective. When Christian coaches started showing up among her clients, she initially referred them elsewhere. Then she realized most of her clients were coaches.

She saw what many of them were missing: structure. “They were trying to just apply hustle and apply grit,” she says. Her answer comes from Scripture: “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” If that is true, she reasons, hustle won’t move you forward. “He’s a God of order, he’s a God of systems. Let’s look at the solar system, the cardiovascular system.”

A business needs sales, marketing, and operations. But having all three doesn’t mean they work together. The offer needs to be clear before the marketing can support it. The marketing needs to lead somewhere. The tasks need to serve a purpose.

Gail calls herself a hybrid. “I’m part trainer.” She doesn’t only ask questions and leave clients to find every answer themselves. She may ask, “With your permission, could I give you a suggestion?” Her clients, she says, want results, and she brings both coaching and practical guidance to help them get there.

Six Weeks Away

Years after the 5:30 chair, her time away tested all of this at once. Gail treated “prepare” as an assignment. She started with tasks, then stopped: “Wait a minute, that’s not working. I need to know where I’m going.” So she worked in order. Sales came first: what would she be selling while she was gone? Then marketing: what would invite and nurture women toward that offer? Only then did she move into the tasks required to make it happen.

The list of finished work was long: podcasts, emails, ads, graphics, open cart emails, posts. Yet she remembers it as “so purpose-driven. It was so coordinated and interwoven and connected.” It “really wasn’t that hard.”

She is honest that preparation did not erase the fear. “It was a big journey of trust.” In mid-September, while still away, she built her October campaign. She came home to margin: “I still have margin now. I still have space.”

So I asked her point blank: when the fear shows up, what do you do? How do you interrupt it? Her answer came from a pastor’s sermon she heard on the trip, one she says “will not leave me.” It drew a “black and white split.” Fear is a feeling, and feelings of fear are human. The choice is what comes next.

“I’m either taking those feelings, which I know are not true. They’re not facts, but they’re still real. And I am running to the Lord with them.”

The other path is to stay in the feeling and ruminate. That, she says, is entering into “the spirit of fear,” “aligning with these lies.” The feeling is human. The spirit of fear, she says, “is not of God.” Gail describes how that pattern can escalate. It can start as irritability, but “where does that go deeper? … It goes into depression. It goes into deep victimhood.” She says the Holy Spirit showed her the difference plainly: “Your feelings are okay, but this is not okay.”

Royal Robe, Face Down

For Gail, the question of trust reaches deeper than how she manages her time or prepares her business. It reaches her identity. She grew up hearing that the flesh is bad, and she took that to mean, “I am bad.”

What she learned in the kingdom is different: “Yes, I have sinned, but Jesus died to wipe that clean.” Her conclusion is blunt: “If I’m walking around like I’m broken, I’m denying what he did on the cross.”

She doesn’t believe that embracing her identity in Christ leads to pride. “The closer you become truly believing in your identity, the more humble you get.” The royal robe doesn’t send her off to be royalty.

“That makes me want to fall on my knees, fall on my face, and say, Jesus, without you, I can’t do any of this.”

Feelings Inform. They Don’t Drive.

When Gail talks about mature faith and mature business leadership, she comes back to conviction. A mature Christian, or a mature business owner, she says, “operates from a place of conviction and commitment versus a place of feelings.”

Her point is not about years of experience but about whether you act from an inner conviction that you’re called. The Lord gave us feelings, she says, but “they’re just there to inform us.”

I first met Gail through her five-day Kingdom CEO Challenge. The progression reflects what she has learned: seek first, self-govern, connect with your business and your mission, invite rather than sell, and build yourself, your clients, your community, and your business.

When she needed to prepare for six weeks away, she didn’t have to choose between trusting God and doing the work. She did both.

It all starts where her mornings start. He gets Gail first.