Why we started The Redeemed Worker
Proverbs and Sgtrategies was started due to a sermon on the Ethiopian Eunich. Phillip ran up to the Eunich and said “ do you understand what you are reading?” I remember sitting in church feeling like the Lord was asking me how businesses were going to understand the opportunity they had to do business with a biblical context. I was hearing in my soul, who will teach them? Just like Phillip was doing in the text with the eunich.
I wrestled with it in prayer thinking about consulting business leaders on the side because I love my primary career and the group of people I serve with. In my soul I felt another question coming around. Why not teach employees a biblical basis for work? I had written a book describing what God had shown our family about work over 20 years. It began to make sense.There is little opportunity for workers to be exposed to the type of coaching executives get to refine their craft. The good Lord had given me decades of experience learning to grow in my relationship with Him. To learn looking back on how He used difficult jobs,difficult coworkers and exceptional circumstances to teach me more about Him and why work was created during creation.
I had a memory of a young man I lead in a big box retailer in North Carolina that kept coming back. This young man was very capable. His struggle was also one of perspective. He would work for 30 minutes of an hour and then dissappear until the start of the next hour in which he would repeat the pattern of working hrad for another thirty minutes then disappearing again.
I confronted him one day when I got tired of searching for him. Honestly I was hot and miffed. I cornered him near a large freezer section which he came out of from hiding from me. I asked him what in the world he was doing. He explained that he was under paid. he felt thirty minutes work was sufficient for his hourly pay. We discussed the value of work and the integrity needed to do a good job. We had a fairly deep conversation for around ten minutes but I never got across to him the value of a good days work.
Over time as my perspectives changed as God was growing me and helping me change, I wrote a book on work and in doing so, I had the confidence to describe our families journey and the growth it gave me especially at work as a leader but even more so as a Father and Husband. My wife gave up a career to care for our oldest child who has down syndrome. She supported me as God grew me.Her faith and prayer held our family together while the Lord changed me through work.
That is why this website exists. We all have a story. Our story may help you understand what God is doing in your life. How He is growing you in your particular situations. Your support is valued as we create a community that can encourage one another to see work as more than a means to an end. We can see it more than the daily grind. We can see it as a place we join hands with Jesus and live out His purpose for us every day as we serve our customers and one another on our teams in our workplaces.
