How staring death in the eye can renew your passion for work
How a near-death experience renewed Becky's passion for her work, how she contrasts the peace she has in Christ with the happiness many of her co-workers pursue, and why Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) can be a powerful means of sharing the gospel at work.
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[0:00:05.4] JR: Hey everybody, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast, I’m Jordan Raynor. How does the gospel influence the work of mere Christians, those of us who aren’t pastors or religious professionals but who work as funeral directors, insurance agents, and firefighters? That’s the question we explore every week and today, I’m posing it to Becky Pomerleau.
She’s the director of Compliance at PayPal who has a wild story of a near-death experience when she was 34 years old, at the height of physical health, and we talked about how that near-death experience actually renewed her passion for her work.
We talked about how she contrasts the perfectly secure piece she has in Christ with the temporal happiness many of our coworkers pursue in the workplace. We talked about employee resource groups and how they can be a powerful means of sharing the gospel at work, especially within larger companies. I think you’re going to love this conversation with my new friend, Becky Pomerleau.
[INTERVIEW]
[0:01:19.6] JR: Becky, welcome to the Mere Christians Podcast.
[0:01:21.2] BP: Thanks for having me Jordan, great to be here.
[0:01:23.2] JR: I want to dive straight into the dramatic deep end of this pool if that’s okay with you, Becky?
[0:01:30.2] BP: Let’s go for it.
[0:01:31.6] JR: So November 2014, got few cares in the world I got to imagine, you’re young, healthy, very successful, and then everything, at least as it relates to your health, changes almost overnight. Would you mind sharing that story with our listeners? And take as much time as you like.
[0:01:47.8] BP: Absolutely. So my husband and I were on vacation celebrating our five-year wedding anniversary. We lived in Silicon Valley at the time but we were in Breckinridge, Colorado on a ski trip, and on Black Friday, the day right after Thanksgiving-
[0:02:02.5] JR: How ominous.
[0:02:04.9] BP: I know, right? We came in from a morning of sled riding, one of my best friends from college lives in Boulder, Colorado and so her and her family were up with us in the mountains. We came in from sled riding, I just felt this uncomfortable pressure in my chest, like, it wasn’t – I would still not describe it as painful, that it was just something that was different than I had ever felt.
And I did have some tingling down my left arm and so I thought, “This is kind of strange, maybe I should take some aspirin.” So, I asked my husband where the aspirin was, which is something that I do not normally take or at least, didn’t previously take medications or even over-the-counter medications typically. He told me where the aspirin was.
But of course, he was like, “Why are you asking?” And so I was like, “Oh, you know, just having some pressure.” I took some aspirin and the symptoms went away within just a few minutes and so I thought, “Oh, that was weird” but I didn’t think that much of it. And then on Sunday morning, two days later, I woke up from sleep with the same symptoms.
I went into the bathroom and I shut the door, I sat down on the edge of the bathtub because, in my mind, I’m thinking, “I want to see if these symptoms will go away without needing to take the aspirin because if they do, then it’s probably no big deal.” As you mentioned, I was healthy, I was a collegiate athlete, I ran track.
[0:03:25.6] JR: Yeah, you're a D1 athlete of Missouri, you’re in pretty good shape, right?
[0:03:29.8] BP: Yeah and even at this point, I was 34 years old, so a little removed from college but still, my husband and I would run together. Again, we’ve been skiing all week so the last thing on my mind is that I could potentially be having a heart attack.
I’m sitting there in the bathroom and I’m having the tingling sensation in my arm and it’s stronger than it was the first day, and so I’m stretching it out thinking maybe I’m just having some nerve compression. I don’t know how long I was in the bathroom but I was definitely in there long enough that my husband was wondering why I didn’t come back to bed.
So when he checked on me, I was like, “Well, I’m having those same symptoms” and he immediately said, “We need to get you to the emergency room if you're having chest pain.” Of course I’m like, “Well, it’s not painful. It’s just you know, it’s different.”
I took some aspirin and we go to the emergency room and of course, they immediately take me back. And keep in mind, visualize it, we’re up in the mountains. So that’s not a big hospital. People probably generally go there for broken bones and torn ligaments and things.
Immediately took me back, there were some slight abnormalities in my tests and so they said, “Hey, we need to send you down to Denver for further testing that we can’t do here and we need to send you by ambulance.” And that was the first moment when my husband and I really looked at each other and realized, something could actually be wrong here.
So we go down to Denver, we ended up spending the night in the hospital before the further testing the next day, and it was at that point where they said, “Okay, we’re going to do an angiogram or cardiac cauterization, where they go in an artery in your groin to take images of your arteries and your heart to see if there’s any form of blockage and what might be causing it.”
And so in my mind, I’m thinking, “Okay, we’re going in for a routine test, we’re going to get some answers as to what’s going on and we’ll come up with an action plan.” Very, again, practical, analytically minded, all numbers and calculations. I’m an accountant, so this is my thinking. They told my family that this test would just take, maybe not the test itself, but the prep, the test and then bringing me back out of the procedure would take maybe three hours in total.
Three hours go by, my family doesn’t hear anything. Four hours go by, my husband starts asking, “What’s going on?” I don’t remember exactly how much time pass but finally, the doctor came out and told my family that. “We almost lost her.” And as you had mentioned, going from being healthy and skiing one day to this almost overnight scenario of my family learning that I had suffered a series of heart attacks and I had a condition called spontaneous coronary artery dissection or SCAD, which means that your coronary arteries that supply oxygen to your heart muscle had tears, and that’s what a dissection is that, those artery starts to tear.
And blood seeps into the outer lining of your artery and that causes a blockage which then causes the heart attack. And just not anything that we had ever contemplated that I would be, at age 34, having heart attacks. They ended up deciding that they needed to life light me from this hospital on the west side of Denver to a hospital on the east side of Denver that had more of the technology and the expertise to save my life.
At the next hospital, then they tried putting me on a balloon pump which unfortunately did not work. They couldn’t – my veins apparently are too small, they can get the balloon pump placed properly and so at that point, they told my family, our chances of survival are around 30%, maybe 20 to 30% and she’s going to need a new heart to live, she needs a heart transplant.
A lot of people who go through receiving an organ, they maybe were in a state of health decline for a period of time and they’ve had an opportunity to understand and research what does this mean. I wake up in a different hospital about five days later, having gone through actually multiple surgeries just to get me ready to be strong enough to accept a heart transplant, and it’s just, how do you put that together in your mind of being healthy one day and waking up in a completely different hospital, one you need a new heart to live?
As you learn more about the process and understanding that someone else has to die for you to live, that’s a very heavy thing. It’s also something that gives me a real sense of obligation and a joyous obligation and what does God want me to do with my life going forward because He obviously said, “I’m not done with you yet. I have things for you to do.” Because I subsequently learned that my heart was from a 13-year-old girl and so if she, at 13 years old, if it was her time, at 34 years old, it was not my time, that means that God has a lot he wants me to do yet, with the time, the second chance of life he’s given me.
[0:08:48.8] JR: If I’m remembering the version of the story I heard before, you were employed at PayPal or eBay, I mean, obviously when all this happened. And I’ve also read you say before that after the transplant, just part of you wanted to quit your job and move to the mountains and just fully focus on prayer and God’s Word. I think anyone can understand that to a degree but you chose to stay, why? What are the good works you think God prepared in advance for you to do and gave you a new heart?
[0:09:19.5] BP: Yeah, as you said, coming out of the transplant, there is a lot of unknowns as to what I would physically be capable of doing. I had met some recipients who never went back to work and there was probably a little bit less physical and more mental because going through the experience, you can have some mental issues as well coming out of these, depending on how long your brain was deprived of oxygen or things. So initially, there was just a period of focusing on getting better and thinking about, “Man, it sure would be nice to just go live in a cabin and the mountains and just enjoy God’s creation and take the easy life” right?
But I did have a counselor who suggested, “Hey, I know it can seem like when these big life events happened that you should make big changes in your life, but maybe first try to see what getting back to some normalcy is like, and then make those big life decisions.” That was advice that we followed and so we did. As I had mentioned, we lived in California at the time but we were on vacation.
We were not intentionally doing health tourism or on vacation in Colorado, so I’m at transplant in Colorado, we stayed in Colorado for a few months to follow-up care and then came back to California. eBay was great in supporting me while I was out on disability and keeping my role open for me. When I came back, initially part-time, I couldn’t even walk up the full flight of stairs to get to the second floor where my desk was without having to stop halfway and catch my breath.
But I took the stairs instead of the elevator because I knew that this was part of what I needed to do to get stronger for whatever those things were that God had prepared for me. So, the initial focus was just, “Okay, let’s get back to doing what – seeing what I’m capable of doing.” I also made a goal list during this time. I did a lot of journaling while I was out on medical leave and focusing on, “God, what do you want me to do with this second chance at life and this gift that you’ve given me?”
And that’s something that I highly recommend people just in general is, regardless of the frequency that you do it, stop, and whether it’s daily, whether it’s monthly or only a few times a year, take stock of where is God sending you and where does He want you. As an accountant, I do this little thing called the, “What does Jesus want for my life today?” That’s a T account, which is an accounting thing.
Where on the left-hand side, it’s the positive and on the left-hand side, it’s the negative or the debits and the credits. On the left-hand side, what does Jesus want more of for my life today and what does Jesus want less of? Because sometimes we think about what does God want me to do but sometimes he wants you to stop doing something or stop spending so much time on something.
And so using some of those techniques are what have helped me to really narrow in and focus on what God has prepared, and that is, I believe, truly through the business world. I see that business, especially in American society, really influences and has that power, if you will, in our society, and maybe it’s partially because that’s where the money is.
But I can see that through business and the business world, that is my mission field, that is where God wants me. I got connected with some different people who asked me, and two different people specifically who were in different parts of my life who said, “Hey, have you ever thought about helping to start a faith-based employer resource group at PayPal?” and I was like, “What are these employee resource group things?”
So I started researching that, but I knew that God wouldn’t have had people from these very different areas of my life literally, within just a couple of weeks of each other, ask me that same question. We are very blessed here at PayPal to have, at the time, had our senior vice president, general counsel, Wanji Walcott had previously been at AMX and then was at PayPal. And at Amex, they had had faith-based employee resource groups for like 25 plus years, and when she came to PayPal, she was like, “Hey, why don’t we have them here, let’s get this started?” and she as looking.
She championed it at the exact gate of level and was looking for someone here to help lead it, that’s how I got started for me, this employee resource group world. And what I am really passionate about is the fact that my faith was my source of hope and my source of resilience through all that time in the hospital, where I’m lying in the hospital bed, not even really able to walk and thinking, “God, are you going to bring me a heart? Am I going to get a heart soon enough that I’m actually going to live?” I was actually on an external machine functioning as my heart.
I didn’t have a heartbeat, which is an interesting fact, but just all that time sitting there, wondering, “Am I going to get a heart, am I going to get a heart?” And yet, God just gave me this sense of peace in that time. I mean, I could control nothing, like I said, I couldn’t even walk on my own without an entourage of people trying to help me and take a few steps down the hallway. Yet in that moment of physical pain, mental anguish, God just gave me the sense of peace and the sense of hope that He’s got this and He’s with me.
I want people to be able to bring that same source of hope and resilience into the workplace because number one, it just makes for happier employees and number two, there’s real value in that. And that’s what I’m really passionate about helping employers to see, is that it’s not just the freedom to believe what you want to believe. That’s a key part of our faith-based employee resource group at PayPal called Believe but also, that there is intrinsic value in hiring and retaining employees of faith.
[0:15:35.3] JR: Yeah, I love this so much. So I love just this metaphor of a new heart, it’s really powerful and just a recognition that – and I think we see this theme all throughout God’s Word that we are not saved just to sit back and retreat and wait for Christ’s second coming. We are always saved to do the good works that He’s prepared in advance for us to do this.
Ephesians, you could argue this is the whole book of Ephesians but certainly, Ephesians 2:8-10, and I do want to go deep on these employee resource groups because I think this is a really practical application. I think this is a really practical example of why you didn’t leave PayPal, but I do think a lot of listeners are like, “What the heck is an employee resource group?” Explain at a really high level what these ERGs are at these big companies.
[0:16:24.7] BP: So, employee resource groups are very much what the name says, they’re resource groups for employees and typically based around a certain identity, whether that’s your gender, whether that’s an ethnicity or race or whether it be, your faith. For many people, especially people of faith, their faith is their core identity and these resource groups provide resources to employees to thrive in the workplace.
Whether that be helping them with mentorship programs or just ensuring psychological safety, it really spans the spectrum of the type of support that you would want for your employees based around those various identities. One of the great things about these at most companies is, while they may be based around the certain identity, they are open to people of all identities.
[0:17:22.9] JR: Yes, I can go to any meeting, right?
[0:17:25.2] BP: Yes, exactly, because that’s really how you build the support for maybe the marginalized groups is that you do have people who are not of that marginalized group who are helping and supporting those together.
[0:17:39.9] JR: Yeah, I am huge fan of ERGs and just as an encouragement to listeners, I’ve seen incredible fruit both spiritually and for the business result from these groups. I would highly encourage – I’ve spoken at a couple Christians at Meta, Christians at LinkedIn et cetera, et cetera.
I do think it’s interesting, I was reading on your bio, Becky. It says that you advocate for freedom of religion and belief and not “freedom or advocacy of specifically Christian values” because your ERG, what’s the official name of it? It’s a cross-religious lines, correct?
[0:18:14.6] BP: It is, it’s an interfaith ERG and it’s called Believe.
[0:18:18.2] JR: Yeah, tell us a little bit about the philosophy or why not a Christians at PayPal group, why a broader group? I’m really interested in how you're thinking about this.
[0:18:26.2] BP: When we were initially starting the faith-based employee resource group, one of the questions that we answered at the beginning is, “Should we have an interfaith ERG or should we have separate ERGs by faith background?” So a Christian group, a Muslim group, a Jewish group, et cetera, an atheist group even.
And as we did some benchmarking with other companies, some of the very ones that you’ve already mentioned, you know, Meta, Google, Apple, Salesforce, et cetera, we saw a variety of models, and our HR group at the time was very much focused on inclusion and I would say, as a company, PayPal is very much focused on inclusion in the financial markets and trying that everyone, you know, democratizing financial services for everyone.
So inclusion is a big part of what we do here and so, one of the things that I wrestled with in that is, “Well, am I creating a platform for other faiths that I don’t believe in?” Going to an interfaith employee resource group, and I wrestled with that, one of the verses that really brought some clarity to me was John 1:12 through 13, which says, “Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believe in His name, He gave the right to become children of God. Children not born of natural descent nor of human decision or husband’s will but were of God.”
And it was that He gave the right to become children of God really resonated with me in that about the freedom to choose to believe in Christianity. Now, I believe that we cannot come to that on our own, that we do need the help of the Holy Spirit to come to faith, but wanting to be able to create an environment where Christianity can thrive. I also received some advice from Pastor Roy Tinklenberg out of Faith and Work Movement, that if Christians always stay just within their Christian group, and it’s great that we can support each other, but how are we really showing Jesus’ love to others when we stay in our bubble?
[0:20:39.0] JR: And that’s the argument that I love, right? I love that you’re interacting with Muslims and Buddhists within your organization. I mean, this is beautiful. I got to imagine that there is spiritual fruit that has come out that interfaith model or that through God’s grace, will come out that model eventually. I think this is really special but there’s also, there’s also tangible business results from groups like this.
You were on a panel a couple of years ago with executives from Twitter, Salesforce, Extensor et cetera on how these interfaith groups make work better. Can you touch on that real quick? What was the net of that conversation?
[0:21:17.0] BP: Just think, people sometimes tend to look at religion as being divisive. Yes, there are plenty of examples in the news headlines of people of different faiths, conflict around that, like war conflict. And so I think sometimes religion can get a bad rep in that regard. So when you can demonstrate in the context of the workplace that people of these different fates that sometimes that can be viewed as divisive, and that these people are coming together and finding common ground and building relationships with each other, and creating this network of people who are loving on each other from various different backgrounds, that is such a model for peace in the world and peace within your workplace.
And that was the gist of the value that this brings is when there is so much divisiveness in the world around us people, actually look to our interfaith group as the model for, “Hey, when there are difficult things that come up in the world you guys are ready every day solving for this and able to find common ground. What’s your secret sauce in being able to find that common ground?”
[0:22:30.7] JR: Yeah, and people pointed to you to solve problems, right? Isn’t that what the church would be in these places of work? I love that. All right, so part of your calling post-health crisis is focused on these ERGs. Another part of it, as you explained it in an email to me, is to be part of “to heal the nations through restoration to in God we trust.” What do you mean by this?
[0:22:54.0] BP: I believe that this is the calling that God has given me and the restoration, sometimes when people hear that restoration word they think that you’re looking to go back to a different time, a yesteryear, the good old days or something, but really, it’s the restoration from a life of sin to a life of freedom in Jesus. That’s the “In God We Trust” component, because I truly believe that and maybe you could say this about any time in which you are living.
But we are in a world today where it seems that we’re moving further and further away from God as a society. And I don’t mean necessarily church attendance, I mean truly what people are believing in their hearts. You touched on this earlier as well, that my life verse is from Ezekiel 36:26, “I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”
That restoration assured of removing that heart of stone and giving you a heart of flesh, that is physically what happened to me but metaphorically as well, spiritually, our hearts are hardened and we need Jesus to give us that heart of flesh, Him dying on the cross for our sins and replacing our hardened heart with a heart of flesh, our soft pliable heart that’s full of life. So, I believe that this healing comes in the individual heart of every single person.
It is not necessarily, well, you know the business world, the government, and those things are avenues and the church as well, right? They’re all avenues to reach people. It really comes down to reaching the individual hearts of people. We do that through things like this employee resource groups and creating the environment where the love of Jesus can flourish. We also do that just through our daily interactions with people and reflecting that love of Jesus.
God commands us to a life, a Christ-like life of servant leadership, and so that means in every interaction saying, “It’s not about me.” That Christ-like humility and every interaction is not about me, so that starts with listening to other people, understanding their needs. If you’re a leader of a company, again, being that servant leader and not making it all about you and, “Hey, what do I need to do to get promoted?” but “How can I support my employees and make sure that they have what they need and they’re provided for and they’re getting the guidance and the nourishing that they need?”
So, I think there’s two components to that calling that I have. One is more the corporate calling, if you will, through these formal employer resource groups and creating that environment where the Gospel can flourish. The other is through just how as an employee or as a human being outside the context of work, I interact with people, and that is through clothing myself of Christ.
[0:26:12.1] JR: I love that so much. It’s really about when we’re clothing ourselves with Christ, I mean, we’re dying to self. We are losing ourselves at the expense of others, right? You talk about caring more about your team’s promotions than you do yours, et cetera, et cetera. Do you think the story that really illustrates this as an encouragement to our listeners of what this looks like in the flesh, three dimensionally working at a big company like PayPal, to care more about those you work with than you do your own career advancement?
[0:26:41.6] BP: Example that I would go to, I had an employee at one point who she was actually probably about 10 years older than me and she had been in the same role for some time when that team is a smaller team of a few folks, and they were added to my team. She came into my team and really was struggling with some, I would say, emotional intelligence, and I knew her to be a Christian.
So that was something that she and I really connected on and even though she was my elder, being able to connect over our Christian faith really opened a door for she and I to have conversations in a way that would say, “Hey, what does – how would Jesus handle this situation?” I think I was able to connect with her in a way that maybe some of her other leaders hadn’t because we were connecting over our faith.
Rather than saying, “Hey, it would be easier for me to maybe manage her out and look to bring in a new leader,” I chose to invest my time in her, to build her up to where she could be the leader that God intended her to be for where He had placed her, because she was the leader of the smaller team and she reported to me. I think that’s a great example of sometimes, we can feel like when we have these challenging employees, it could be easier to try to manage them out.
“I don’t have the time to invest in this person. I don’t know if this person is going to respond anyways,” but when we do take that time and put ourselves aside and say, “Hey, you know this isn’t about me. This is about this person and what they’re capable of” and seeing the beauty of what they’re capable of, that is just one of the proudest moments for me as a people leader was to see how she changed and developed over time.
[0:28:33.0] JR: That’s a really great example. There was this article written in 2017, maybe it sounds like about three years after this big health scare, and you said that your purpose is to, “share God’s saving grace, love, and peace with others.” The writer of the article went on to say in their own words that, “Becky contrasts the peace she knows with the happiness that is the focus of so many people.”
I just thought that was really interesting. I’m curious if you know or if you think you know what that writer meant by that statement. What do you see, Becky, is the difference between the peace we have as Christ followers and the happiness that our coworkers are pursuing? What’s the contrast there?
[0:29:19.2] BP: I love this topic. Our society really pushes us towards striving for happiness. You even hear parents a lot of times say, “Oh, I just want my child to be happy in whatever their relationships are” or things of that nature. But happiness, I don’t know that, I’m sure Jordan you might know better than I do, I don’t know if happiness is anywhere that says in the Bible that that’s what we’re to pursue.
Joy perhaps, but maybe not temporary happiness, and happiness does tend to be temporary. And just as my story of going through a near-death experience and there was a lot of physical pain that went along with that, and not only leading up to the transplant but after the transplant and all the tests after the transplant, they have to test for rejection. So you just got this new heart and every couple of weeks, they’re going through your carotid artery in your neck and putting a sheath down into your heart and taking samples of your heart.
[0:30:18.8] JR: Oh geez, I didn’t know that. That’s crazy.
[0:30:20.9] BP: Not the most painful of things but also not, not painful. We know that there is in this broken sinful world, we will suffer, there will be pain. That’s why I focus more on peace than on happiness, not only because I don’t – I think God doesn’t want us to focus on happiness but because we know there is going to be pain, and how can we come to a place of contentment in all things and peace in all things enduring that pain?
God really did give me just the sense of peace while I was going through all of that that He was there with me. He was going to get us through this, He was not done with me. And so while I was enduring this physical pain, and that mental wondering was I going to get the heart or after I got the heart, what was my life going to be like after? Honestly, I rarely ever question the, “why me?” Because He had given me that peace.
I knew with confidence that He had something planned and prepared for me after this, and I didn’t know what it was and obviously, some of what we have talked about today was a big part of that, and I’m sure He has more things in the future that may be related to what we were doing today or even taking it a different turn, but it’s all to glorify God in our work.
[0:31:42.3] JR: Do you think your coworkers noticed the difference between kind of the peace regardless of circumstances that you have and the circumstantial happiness that they’re chasing after?
[0:31:57.4] BP: I think they do or at least they appreciate a leader who is calm and steady regardless of the circumstances. One of the things that has kept me at PayPal as long as I have is that that is valued. I’ve worked at other companies where perhaps the loudest voice in the room is what gets acknowledged or even celebrated, whereas PayPal with culture does really tend to be that everyone has a voice and those who provide steady leadership are rewarded, not just the, “Hey, we’re going to jump at the shiny object” or whoever is being that loudest voice or the squeakiest wheel is who gets the prioritization.
I do think that people really see the value and that peace, which shows up in the calm and steady leadership especially over the last couple of years when we’ve been – I think we’re beyond a couple of years now, right? Nonetheless, several years through COVID, through social unrest. There is an acknowledgment that this peace in all circumstances brings a lot of value into the workplace.
[0:33:12.4] JR: Well, yeah. I mean, the last few years have just shown us at a different scale what you probably learned through this health crisis that we are not our own, we are not truly self-reliant. And so we need a secure source of peace that is perfectly secure regardless of circumstances, right? If we could be the Christ followers in our places of work who are modeling that, that will preach way louder than our words will.
You said in an interview from a few years back, you said that one of the blessings of this health crisis was just how close you felt to God during that time, and I got to imagine that yes, it is a lot harder to maintain that sense of God’s presence when you went back to work. So how do you maintain a sense of God’s love and presence and peace throughout your work days, Becky?
[0:34:03.4] BP: Yeah, and you bring up a really great point because I think it is something that we all are probably challenged with in the business of life, and especially going from a time when where I was really focused on and I hadn’t – I had the physical time to be focused on spending hours a day journaling and things of that nature, to then back to work full-time and getting involved in other activities.
Not only leading our employee resource group but also serving on Stanford’s patient family advocacy council of heart transplant, and you really wanting to get involved and live a very purpose-filled life and therefore, we get to the business and I love your book, Redeeming Your Time. I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but there’s just some really great wisdom in that, and I think some of the tools that you recommend are ways that we can ensure that we’re not – that we are still investing an hour in spiritual development.
I think that is the key in feeling close to God, is making sure that we are setting aside time, putting it on our calendar just like everything else gets on their calendar, and also, how can we get to this concept of praying continually in all things. I certainly do not do that perfectly by any means, but as I go into a meeting, especially if it’s one where I think we’re going to have to have a difficult conversation or I know we need to get alignment on something, just taking a quick moment before I hit the join button because mostly working remotely these days.
So before I hit that join button and just saying, “God, please guide my words.” Doing those little things like that throughout the day, for me, actually helped me feel closer to God than if I had a block of time that’s just that one point in time throughout the day. So, it is more of a continual reflection on relying on the Holy Spirit in my interactions throughout the day.
[0:36:08.8] JR: I think there’s something really powerful about attaching a reminder of God’s presence or attaching a reminder to pray, just something habitual throughout your work days, whether it’s logging on Zoom or I don’t know, open up a tab in your browser that has some reminder to pray about what you’re about to start working on. I don’t know what that is but I think that is really powerful.
I got to ask you this before we go because to quote my favorite Hamilton, “I personally imagine death so much, it feels more like a memory.” I think about death a lot. I imagine you have as well in various seasons, given what you went through. When death does cross your mind, the prospect of death, which thoughts immediately follow?
[0:36:51.7] BP: It’s a great question. You know, it is interesting that at the time when I was going through all the course and death was there at the threshold then at the same time, that fight or flight kicked in and I was just so focused on how do I get through to the next thing that I need to do, and it wasn’t even taking it day-by-day, sometimes it was taking it minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, like what is the nurse saying?
The next thing I need to do is sit in a chair for 30 minutes and being able to tolerate that, right? Or start brushing my own teeth. So I was very focused on those things and not even having a lot of thoughts about, “What if I die? What’s that process going to be like?” I have thought after I’ve recovered, I have thought more about that and I used to think naively before all of this that I wasn’t scared of death, because then I would get to be in heaven and everything will be wonderful, and now I know the process to death can be painful.
So when I think about death, I do think about Jesus on the cross and when he asked, He said He was thirsty and He asked for water and He got that vinegar on the sponge or a version of a sponge back then. When I woke up from my drug-induced coma and they started trying to give me water, they actually gave me water on a very small sponge on a stick because if I had too much water at once, it will make me nauseous and bad things would happen.
I think about how can I have that same level of thirst that I had for that water then as Jesus had for that water in His time of death, how can I have that same level of thirst for Jesus every day? So that’s when I think about death, it reminds me of those moments, and thinking about how can I make sure that I have that same thirst for Jesus so that when death comes, I’m prepared and I am ready to stand before the judge and say, “Thank you, Jesus, for taking my place”
[0:38:56.7] JR: I love that answer, I mean, and that is practicing for eternity, right? John Piper, I’m going to butcher the quote but John Piper said something along the lines of, “Those who would be happy in heaven without Jesus probably aren’t going to be in heaven.” Because He’s the point. And yes, there are other great things. There is culture in the new Jerusalem and the new earth and great things that we’re going to get to explore and create for all of eternity, but Jesus is the point, right? So as we practice thirsting for Him and communing with Him now, we are practicing something that is eternal. It’s a great answer, Becky.
Hey, three questions we wrap up every podcast with. Number one, which books do you find yourself recommending or gifting most frequently? This can be Christian living books, this can be business books, they could be accounting books if you want, Becky, whatever. What books do you find yourself recommending most?
[0:39:48.2] BP: So a book that I’d come across more recently by Cory Carlson, it’s called Rise and Go.
[0:39:53.7] JR: I endorse this book.
[0:39:55.4] BP: Oh awesome, so did I yeah.
[0:39:57.2] JR: Yeah, that’s a good book.
[0:39:58.3] BP: It really has it – well, it’s not a workbook, right? It has a lot of practical exercises in it and one that I loved and why I brought it up here is to pray to God to say, “Please make me aware of any place in my life where I am playing it safe and holding onto something. I want to live in freedom and not tethered to safety.” And I think that’s kind of what I was doing, not that I don’t still do it sometimes, but that was what I was doing in my life before my heart transplant and near-death, that whole experience is that I wasn’t getting off the sidelines in terms of my Christianity.
I have been a Christian my entire life, baptized as a baby, went to church every Sunday growing up, all of that, but I kept my faith more private and that’s not what God commands us to do. And so I was really tethered to safety and not living in freedom.
[0:40:52.0] JR: Cory’s book is a terrific guide if you’re in that spot right now, to rise and go. So that’s a great recommendation, Becky. Hey, who would you want to hear on this podcast talking about how their faith shapes the work they do in the world?
[0:41:03.9] BP: A counterpart of mine at a different company, Craig Carter. He was formerly with Intel and he has such a great message of what he calls the courageous third. I would love for him to talk more about that on this podcast but similar to some of the things that we’ve talked about in terms of he also helped create a cross-faith employer resource group at Intel where they did have, they actually started with separate faith-based employer resource groups.
So he had brought that together and so he’s taking a bit of a sabbatical at the moment, but he’s doing some really cool great things right now.
[0:41:42.9] JR: All right Becky, you are talking to an audience of mere Christians, very diverse vocationally, what they share is a desire to do great work that glorifies God and loves their neighbor as their selves. What is one thing you want to leave that audience with before we sign off today?
[0:41:58.5] BP: I would say don’t wait for a cataclysmic event in your life to get off the sidelines. The fact that they are listening to this podcast says that they are at least thinking about it. So they’re at the starting line and I would say take that step out in faith. Don’t wait for God to have to push you in a way that He had to push me, take those steps out in faith and start to share your love of Jesus with your coworkers.
[0:42:25.9] JR: Becky, I want to commend you for the exceptional work you do for the glory of God and the good of others. Thank you for reminding us of the purpose of redemption, it’s not to sit back and wait for Jesus’s return. It is to busy ourselves with the good works He’s prepared in advance for us to do. Thank you for giving us such a great example of what it looks like to live in to those good works. I really appreciate you spending time with us today, Becky.
[0:42:49.8] BP: Thank you for having me Jordan, this was great.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
[0:42:53.4] JR: Man, wild story. Praise God for saving Becky. It is such an encouragement to see her fully engaged in the work God’s created and saved her to do. Guys, if you’re enjoying this podcast, do me a favor and go leave a review of the show on Apple Podcast and Spotify, wherever you listen to the program. Thank you guys for tuning in, I’ll see you next week.
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