The best insight I’ve ever received into major donor development and the coaching of champions came from my wife, Hyun Sook.

“Food,” she opined, “does not come in a box.”

We were not at that moment talking about major donor development or the coaching of champions. Nor were we at that moment married. Rather, we were engaged, and she was visiting my townhome and taking astonished inventory of my pantry, which, as you can now surmise by her comment, consisted entirely of foods in boxes and wrappers –freeze-dried noodles of this kind and TV dinners of that kind, Library of Congress-sized stacks of ramen noodles, and more jars of peanut butter than are stocked in the pantries of most Mormons. The only thing in my whole house that passed The Food Test was a single watermelon that she had bought me a week or two earlier, which I had not yet touched because, I reasoned, it was too large to fit in the microwave, the one food preparation apparatus I was able to successfully operate.

I am happy to report that not only do we remain sublimely happily married, more so with each passing year, and not only do I now eat healthier than even cheetahs in the wild thanks to my wife’s peerless care, but I learned lessons about major donor development and the coaching of champions from this godly companion that I simply could have never learned anywhere else.

Namely:

If food doesn’t come in a box, donors sure don’t either. They’re Holy Spirit-built, not nonprofit-discovered; invited, coached, and challenged, not solicited; savored with our full attention, not wolfed down in five minutes while we are busy doing other things.