How to make any j-o-b feel like a calling
Jordan Raynor sits down with Ronald R. Johnson, Customer Service Representative, to talk about how Ron came to embrace a job he once hated, how to have a real-time, 3-way conversation between you, God, and those you work with, and what managers can do to truly bless their frontline employees.
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[00:00:04] 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 paralegals, roofers, and video game designers? That's the question we explore every week. Today, I'm posing it to Ron Johnson, who has more than 20 years’ worth of experience, working in one of the hardest jobs on the planet, the job of a customer service representative. I love this guy. I love his story. I'm so excited to share with you.
In this episode, Ron and I talk about how he came to embrace a job he once hated, and really view it as his calling. We talked about how to have a real-time, three-way conversation between you, God, and those you work with. We talked about what managers can do to truly bless their frontline employees, including customer service reps. Guys, I think you're going to really love this great conversation with my new friend, Ron Johnson.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:01:24] JR: Ron Johnson, welcome to the podcast.
[00:01:26] RJ: Thanks. Great to be here.
[00:01:28] JR: We should clarify on the front end that you are the Ron Johnson.
[00:01:34] RJ: That's right.
[00:01:34] JR: Right? The one and only, because, as our listeners know, actually wasn't too long ago, we had the other Ron Johnson, the Ron Johnson that Steve Jobs tapped to create the Apple Store. By the way, did you listen to the episode?
[00:01:48] RJ: I did. Yes.
[00:01:49] JR: Yeah. Do you know Ron?
[00:01:50] RJ: No.
[00:01:51] JR: You guys need to know each other. It’ll be an amazing episode.
[00:01:54] RJ: Yeah.
[00:01:55] JR: The Ron and Ron Johnson Show. I was telling you before we started, I love your story and I can't wait for listeners to hear it. Let's start here. I think this is a good place to start. You got your PhD in philosophy, right?
[00:02:06] RJ: Yeah. Right.
[00:02:07] JR: Taught for a few years, you were unable to secure a tenure track position. Talk us through that season of your life, what was going on with you personally and professionally?
[00:02:16] RJ: Well, it was really hard to understand what God was doing because I went into the doctoral work, fully convinced that this was the way God was leading me to go. Now in retrospect, I can see that it was but when you're going a certain way, and you think, ‘This is the way God is going to do it,’ and you've got your mind set on a certain trajectory and then God ends up doing what he said he was going to do, but in a different way than you were expecting it. Then at first, you just really gotta do this Gestalt shift, and rethink, ‘What does this mean?’ So it was a very painful time at first, when I realized I had to go back to doing what I had done before, working in a call center by day and then teaching at night at the college level.
It was very difficult trying to figure out what God was doing, but to back up, there's a backstory there, Jordan, that you may not know. I didn't mention it in the book that you had read, but all of my life, ever since I was a teenager, I had this idea that God wanted me to be his man on the ground. I got that when I was in high school. I read The Robe, the novel by Lloyd C. Douglas. It's a story about, it's all fictitious, of course, but it's the story about a Roman centurion who won Christ's robe when they threw lots for his robe and so on. As part of his story, what he goes on to do after he becomes a Christian, he has to go into hiding because the emperor is after him. He ends up living in a little village in Italy, where they grow melons, and he becomes the private secretary of the guy who runs the melon Grove.
There's this whole chapter about how his presence there just transforms the way they do their work, and how they get along with each other, and the community and so on. I read that, and I thought, ‘That is what God is calling me to do. I'm going to be God's man on the ground.’ Whenever I told anybody about that, they’d say I'm still just a kid in high school. ‘How are you going to make a job out of that?’ Well, I ended up getting a bachelor's degree in history, and I was going to go on to graduate school and so on, but in the meantime then, as a young adult, I ended up doing lots of things. I was a plate maker in a printing company. I was a produce guy in a supermarket, a substitute teacher in the public schools. I sold advertising for suburban newspapers. I was really the opposite of your book, you know, Master of One. I was just really doing all kinds of little things –
[00:04:40] JR: That was me too at that age. Yeah.
[00:04:42] RJ: Yeah. In all those things, though, my one thing was developing and that was finding God in everything you do. In each of those things, I did. I did find God and I was experiencing each of those things with God. I got to Western Union. That was my longest stint. I worked at Western Union. I started doing telegrams and money transfers and so on and I worked my way up to operations manager. Then by this point, I had a master's degree in education. I got an opportunity to get my PhD in philosophy. I thought, ‘Great.’ So I quit the job as a manager. I went to graduate school. I had this all figured out that God had called me. I was going to then go out and from this professorial role, I was going to tell everybody what God had taught me about life out in the world of work and so on.
Then, like I said, I didn't get a tenure track position. My wife and I had just had our first child. I taught for a couple of years, but then in the year 2000, I didn't have anything at all lined up for the fall. I was desperate. I just had to go out and get a day job. I got a day job as a customer service representative for a bank. Like I said, it was soul wrenching. I could not understand what God was trying to do. Then I eventually began to realize what God was doing was exactly what he had said he was going to do, but just in a different way. I was going to be working a day job in customer service, and I was going to be teaching and writing at night. It wasn't what I had planned, of course, isn't what anybody plans when they get a PhD, but I accepted that temporarily believing that this was what God had called me to do. Not a temporary situation now, 22 years later, by the way.
I came to understand that what God was doing was making me exactly the person I wanted to be, God's man on the ground. And that yes, I was a professor. Yes, I was able to teach and speak and write books and so on, but I was also doing it by day, doing the things that I was talking about. Really, the outgrowth of this is then the book that you mentioned is Customer Service and the Imitation of Christ, where I went into a lot of detail about what it's like trying to be God's person in a customer service call center. I understand you spent some time working in a call center, didn't you?
[00:06:54] JR: Okay. I'm super impressed that you know this.
[00:06:58] RJ: Okay.
[00:06:59] JR: Because I wasn’t speaking about this. This is really funny. I was prepping for this episode and I'm like, ‘I don't think I've ever talked about this publicly.’ But yes. I did. I mean a very brief stint. I can't remember if it was high school or college. It was during a summer here in Tampa. Me and the best man at my wedding, this guy named Josh Hikoltz, yeah, we worked in a call center for two months. It was brutal. I hated it. So I'm reading your book and I'm like, ‘Oh, my gosh. I wish I had had this perspective on the craft of customer service when I was there, but I didn't.’ I was an arrogant little 19-year-old, however old I was.
For those who have never worked this type of job, Ron. Paint a picture of what makes this job so hard. Then we'll talk about the good things, the flip side of that coin, and how you've come to embrace that role as a calling, but start with how most CSRs, customer service representatives, view the job that they have.
[00:08:01] JR: Yeah. First of all, even though you're on the phone all day, it is an extremely lonely position, because you're in your cubicle, you're on that phone, and there is nobody else to help you. You got this person coming in who may or may not be yelling at you, but regardless of whether they are, they're bringing a procedural issue or something that's gone wrong with their product or service or whatnot.
[00:08:24] JR: They don't call thanking you for how great the product is.
[00:08:28] RJ: That's correct. That's right, yes. You've got a script you've got to follow, even though every single call is going to be different. You've got to find the script. So basically you have online tools in front of you and while you're listening, and you're talking, you're multitasking, you're typing search words, and trying to find the answer to what they're talking about. Then you've got to read off the script what that answer is, but do it convincingly like, you're not reading. You've got to do this all within, usually, you're given a goal, a standard goal in call centers is 300 seconds. You've got to do it in an average of 300 seconds or less, that basically comes out to five minutes. That may sound a lot.
If you've got a person with a complex issue, and you've got to solve this issue, you've got to follow the scripts, you've got to do it all and get them off the phone within 300 seconds. I should also say, the reason why this is also important is that you have monthly meetings, sometimes bi-monthly meetings with your team leader, who goes through all the stats and everything is recorded. They've got your calls recorded. They've even got your screens recorded. They're analyzing, ‘Why did you go to this screen? Why didn't you go to this other screen or why did you use this search word rather than that one? Oh, well, you said the word probably. You should never say probably or you said unfortunately.’
All of these things and you've got to think about all of this, because you're going to be evaluated and you're going to be scored. They do it all in numerical scores. You're docked for this or that. You've also got to go to lunch on time. If you don't go on time, then you get docked for that, but you cannot hang up on the call you're on if that call extends into your lunch. All of these things are pressuring you. You gotta think about all this stuff and the poor person on the phone, they don't know that. They're calling you with a problem. They want you to listen to them. They don't realize you're not really listening. You're thinking about a half a dozen other things, and trying to get all those tick marks that you're being evaluated for, and thinking ahead to your next session with your team lead.
[00:10:34] JR: Yeah. This is like, I think you used the word soul wrenching. That feels apt. That feels like a good description of this. Listen, like you admitted in the book, you admitted it a few minutes ago. This is not the work you wanted to do. You just had to get a job, but eventually, you say in this terrific book, you came to embrace the role of this incredibly difficult job as a calling. What happened? What was that journey like to – I mean, you've been doing this now for 22 years. I imagine you've had opportunities to do other things, but you've stayed. Why is this a calling?
[00:11:08] RJ: Well, because I began to realize it's a spiritual practice for me now. It became that very soon into it. I began to realize, this, it just flipped my paradigm of what it means to be a Christian. Jordan, before I did this job, I rarely ever had anybody ever curse me for any reason. Then suddenly, now I'm having it happen all the time. Then suddenly, that brings a whole new light on Jesus saying, ‘Bless those who curse you.’ I realized, as a Christian, I never really had to deal with that before. Now suddenly, it's my everyday reality and other things like that, to be able to turn the other cheek. How often do I really – every once in a while we, as just normal people living normal lives, maybe somebody will do something that'll insult us or hurt us or something and we have an opportunity to turn the other cheek and maybe we'll actually be very grandiose about that and think, “Oh, I'm turning the other cheek.”
Well, this job really forced me to live out my Christian principles in a way that I never had to before. I soon began to understand that's a gift. Not only that, but it was also an opportunity for me to practice what I call the three-way conversation. I'm not only talking to the other person on the phone, but I'm also listening for what God is telling me in each call. Like I said, it became a spiritual practice, an opportunity to practice the presence of God in intense situations I had never had to before for eight hours a day. Like I said, it was a gift.
[00:12:39] JR: I remember, in Every Good Endeavor, that Tim Keller co-wrote with Katherine Alsdorf. Katherine said, she started to see her work, she was a tech executive, as a crucible, or God was pounding and grinding and refining me, right? Most people don't encounter tons of opportunities to love their enemies. I think that's what I'm hearing you say like, you started to realize that this job was a means of cultivating your sanctification, right? That was God working, is that right?
[00:13:13] RJ: Right, absolutely.
[00:13:15] JR: And practicing in the presence of God. I want you to go a layer deeper on this three-way conversation. I love this. Guys, by the way, I want to say the book explicitly, I'll say it at the end, but it's called Customer Service and the Imitation of Christ. It's this extraordinary little book that I thoroughly enjoyed. I crushed it. So you talked about this three-way conversation with a customer. Obviously, a two-way conversation between the customer and the customer service rep. The three-way being the customer yourself and God. What in the world does that look like practically for you?
[00:13:49] RJ: Yeah. I say it's a conversation, but what it really ended up being was just recognizing God's presence. So really practicing the presence while you're having a conversation with people on the phone, because what I discovered was, I just did not have the patience or the compassion to deal with a lot of the stuff that was coming my way but I recognized that God did. I would go into a state of prayer before I would start my shift, so that I'd be recognizing, believe it or not, God is in this place. This, what I would consider God forsaken place in this cubicle with me. God is here with me right now, whether I recognize it or not, so just trying to recognize it, just trying to be aware of that fact.
Then I start taking the phone calls. As I'm listening to the customers, I've got an eye towards God and saying, ‘Okay, what are they saying? How can I help them? How can we help them?’ It really became a case of – there was a lot of background too with looking again at the scriptures and looking at how Jesus had compassion for people who came to him and how the crowds pressed on him and time constraints and the disciples were always trying to hurry him. And Jesus had time for every single one of them and listened to what they were saying and gave them what they needed. That became for me, the three-way conversation. Lord, how can we help this person? How can we bless them? What can we give them before we get them off the phone?
[00:15:18] JR: I love that you pointed out, I never thought about this before, how in the Gospels, Jesus wasn't begrudgingly serving people.
[00:15:26] RJ: Right.
[00:15:27] JR: Right. It was his joy. You pointed to one passage, I can't remember where it was, where he talked about how Jesus said he wanted to heal somebody. Share that with us real quickly.
[00:15:37] RJ: Yeah. There was a leper who came to Jesus and the Book of Leviticus is very clear. Lepers are supposed to stay out of town. They're supposed to stay away from everybody. If anybody comes near them at all, they're supposed to warn them by saying, “Unclean, unclean.” It's in the Law of Moses. That's the law. Jesus knows that. Here comes this leper, who's actually approaching Jesus and coming to be healed. If it were any of us, especially if we know the law, then our response would be, “Hey what are you doing? This is not the right thing to do.” Jesus, he came up to Jesus and he said, “If you want to you can heal me.” Jesus, reached forward, touched him and said, “I want to be healed.” That became really a paradigm for me as I began this adventure as a customer service representative. I realized in my heart, at first, my response was, I don't want to. I don't want to be here at all –
[00:16:26] JR: I’ll do this because it’s my job and I have to, but I don't want to.
[00:16:29] RJ: Right, exactly. Then I just began metaphorically looking into those eyes, looking into those compassionate eyes of Jesus every day, and just thinking, you know, he wants to. He's not here being the flesh, but I am. I'm His representative. I want to be your vessel, Lord. As long as I'm in this job I want to be your means of blessing each of these people. So it really became an adventure for me, just seeing how that all plays out.
[00:16:57] JR: I love it. How did you build that habit of recognizing God's presence in the day-to-day grind while you're sitting there at your computer? I would imagine that's a hard habit to begin developing, to remember that God is with you in that moment.
[00:17:12] RJ: Yeah. Full disclosure, like I had said before, I've been practicing this since I was a teenager. Even in high school, I practiced the presence of God and was just very aware of God with me in the classroom. Even as a professor when I'm up in front of a group of students, I'm very aware that I'm not alone. I've had a lot of years of practicing this, Jordan. Any of us who are serious about practicing the presence, but I will say that there was a distinct difference when I started this, because like I said, you're very, very isolated when you're in that cubicle. You're aware that you're being listened to. You're being judged. You're being criticized, but nobody's helping you. My wife is an accountant, but –
[00:17:56] JR: Mine too, how about that?
[00:17:57] RJ: Yeah. But I'm not a practical person. I mean, I'm a philosopher. So it just was really ironic that I ended up in this. To be honest, a lot of the questions that came, I did not have the background, or the common sense to even understand how banking worked, or what the questions were. I just really threw myself at the mercy of God. I was just very, very aware. Basically, it comes down to this. I was terrified. I was absolutely terrified. Therefore, I was just throwing myself at the mercy of God every day when I signed into this.
[00:18:35] JR: Yeah. I know a lot of people when they hear something like this concept of a three-way conversation, right? They're scratching their heads and asking the age-old question of like, ‘All right, well like, how do if that third person in that conversation talking is the Holy Spirit or just your mind wandering, right?’ How do you answer that question? How do you discern what's from the spirit and what's not as you're talking with customers, Ron?
[00:18:57] RJ: Yeah. Again I have to in a way, you have to be, I guess I have to be a little bit apologetic that I have over 50 years of experience as a Christian. It takes time. It does take time. You sift and you learn by your mistakes. I would say that you cannot ever count on hearing the voice of God, if you're not reading the word of God.
[00:19:19] JR: Amen.
[00:19:19] RJ: In the scriptures and trying to get used to that voice. I know that a lot of this is metaphor, when we say the word voice. Do I hear voices in my head? No, but what I do is listen for what God might be telling me in this particular case, based on the things that I have learned from the scriptures over the years that God wants us to do. So for example, it's not a lot of content that this voice is telling me to do this and this, but the main thing, the main thing that I got from all this was just to learn how to calm down angry people. That was a big part of it and so just little things like, “Ron, your voice is too tense. Calm down.” Now, yes, that's my conscience. That's my mind, but it's a mind that's trying every day to be in tune with the Spirit.
[00:20:13] JR: Yeah. It's a mind that’s shaped by the word of God. It is knowing your mind and giving you this posture to seek to bless, even irate customers, right?
[00:20:25] RJ: Yeah.
[00:20:26] JR: That's what you're doing. Really, it's, I think a lot about – I'm so glad you pointed to the word, right? We can't hear God's voice if we don't read his word. I think the Spirit brings to mind the word and helps us connect what we're reading in the word to the day-to-day circumstances of our life and work, right? Yeah. You mentioned in the book that if we are engaged in these three-way conversations, I forget exactly how you put it but basically, we should be expecting to do miracles through our work. Explain what you mean by this?
[00:21:01] RJ: Well, especially in customer service, as I said in the book, I've never had anybody come to me and asked me to heal them. Every single day, I have people ask me to perform customer service miracles. What it sounds like, when that happens is, “I've talked to five other people and they couldn't help me. Can you help me?”
[00:21:19] JR: By the way, not just CSRs, I mean, anyone at work experiences it. Entrepreneurs experience this. “Hey, I've tried three other solutions. None of them worked, right? What makes yours different? Can you solve my problem?” Yeah.
[00:21:31] RJ: Right. Yeah, so number one then, the first thing is, “How am I going to do that? Five other people have failed at this. How am I going to come up with anything better?” That's how I used to feel. I mean, like I said, I didn't even know banking. I really began with a sense of wonderment, “How am I even going to come up with any solution for this person?” Part of the miracle is that, yes, there are answers. Other people missed them, but you can find them with the help of God.
The other thing is that, at least in my work and especially when I worked in a smaller bank. I was able to build rapport with people in back offices who could help me. Then that's what I referred to as different kinds of customer service miracles that I was able to do. Different people who had fallen through the cracks. I could reach out to some of our support systems. I could say, “Hey, this person has such and such issue, is there some way we can help them?” One of the things I talk about in the book is that a lot of times we CSRs, we customer service representatives fail to successfully reach out to business partners because we come at them so intensely, and do not understand their work that they have to do.
Part of the miracle, I guess, for me has been learning what other people in my company do. What they need from me, if I come to them with a request. And as God teaches you those things and you learn to how to work effectively with people in the back offices, I have found that you can get things done for customers that at first seem impossible.
[00:23:07] JR: Yeah. Also as Christians, we have unique resources here. If we believe that the Creator God who created 17,500 species of butterflies, dwells inside of us, then we should be the ones most confident in our ability through the power of the Spirit to find creative solutions to problems. I've read about this before in the context of Daniel, Daniel chapter two, right? All the wise men are coming to the king to interpret his dreams, even though he won’t tell them the content of the dream and they were like, “Nobody could do this. This isn't possible.” But Daniel goes to his buddies to say, “Hey, we're going to pray and ask God to reveal this to us, because he can.” He understood that those followers of the one true God have the ability to do the absolute impossible work. We can do miracles, not in our own strength, but through the strength of God and that should empower us to be very bold, right, Ron?
Ron, as I was reading your book. I was thinking about the management dynamic in a business powered by customer service reps. Managers are always trying to optimize the productivity of their teams. You talked about the 300 second goal, right? You, as a customer service rep, especially as a Christ follower, you want to serve the customer as best you can, right? There's a tension here, right? As Christ followers, we're called to serve our employers with excellence, see, Ephesians six, Colossians three, etc. and we're called to love our neighbors as ourselves. I'm curious, do you feel that these are competing priorities? If so, how do you work through that tension?
[00:24:50] RJ: I did feel they were competing priorities at first, but I've worked through it in a couple of different ways. The first thing that I had to work through was the realization that I am called to love and serve my managers along with everybody else. That was the first thing, but then over time, I began to realize that if you're really doing this right, there doesn't have to be that big of a tension. Like I said, when I started out, I didn't know anything about banking and so on. What I've learned over the years is, the better you are at what you do and if what you're doing, even though there's all these scripts and so on, and search words you have to look for it all. I know the procedures now. The more you know then the more you can take a deep breath, relax, speak with a calm voice, but a reassuring voice that tells the person you're talking to, “What I'm going to tell you, you can trust, because I know what I'm doing.”
[00:25:50] JR: It’s like a technical mastery that leads to the mastery of the softer things.
[00:25:54] RJ: That's right. Yup. So basically for the past several years now, I've been top of the board, and my managers love talking to me. I love talking to them. We're all on the same page. We're all trying to do the same thing. It's just the difficulty is when you don't have that technical mastery, and you're thrust in this position, it can be heart wrenching and you just have to really rely on God to help you try to navigate. For me in those early years, it was very difficult. There were times when I really did have tense moments in my evaluations, because I wasn't meeting the time goals and so on. I've been on both sides of that, but my advice to anybody who is starting out in a role where you're feeling that way, is just try to take a deep breath, try to trust God, and learn your job, learn your job –
[00:26:45] JR: Learn your craft as fast as you possibly can, right?
[00:26:48] RJ: Right.
[00:26:48] JR: Because mastery wins the respect of outsiders. This is Master of One. Speaking of which, I think a lot of people, Ron, have a hard time seeing how, I don't know, seeing how their work matters in the grand scheme of things, in the grand scheme of eternity if they're not explicitly sharing the gospel with their co-workers. I think that's a challenge if you're a CEO or a customer service rep. How do you personally think about the eternal significance of your work as you go to work day in and day out as a CSR?
[00:27:16] RJ: Well, I see it, first of all, as being an extension of Christ's work. He's not just talking about himself here. He's trying to bring us abundant life. I really do focus on extending his work through my own. I especially noticed since COVID started, before that we were all in cubicles, and then suddenly, massive effort, they packed us all up and sent us home. Then I started working from my home in my den, talking to customers. I immediately found that I had new resources with my voice that I never had before, because all the ambient noise of that big call center was gone. All the other people in the other cubicles that I had to talk over, was gone. Suddenly, I had the ability, I could talk very softly, and bring my voice way down, and people could still hear me.
Now when I was getting customers on the line, and they were screaming and yelling, I could speak softly to them, and I could calm them down. So many people were coming on the line, because, yeah, “COVID and I need my money. It's locked up, and I can't get into a branch.” I could just calm them down. Then I could give them the answer. I could help them too, but first I could calm them down. It really became clear to me in 2020 when all this started that, man what a gift to be able to calm people down in these desperate times. Then yes, if you can tell them about Jesus, too. That's icing on the cake, but just to be able to be His peace in this world.
And to be able to, I guess while I'm on that subject, too, I do this all day, Jordan. Then when I hang up the headset, it doesn't end there. So then when I go out and I'm talking to my wife and my daughter and even our pets, you can still speak calmly. You can still be the calming influence when things are so hyper around you and you go out into the community. The things that I've learned in this job are skills that are transferable into everything else you do. They're basically Christ-following skills and that is, “Go out and share the peace of Jesus Christ with everybody you can.” Sometimes you'll be able to do it in words. You'll be able to tell them about him, but a lot of times you just do it in your tone of voice or in the way you treat people and the gifts that you're able to give them.
[00:29:35] JR: It's so good. I think when people initially hear, “Oh, as a customer service rep, I'm continuing the work of Christ.” They scratch their heads. They're like, “What are you talking about? Jesus made tables. He preached the gospel word indeed.” But this is such a concrete terrific example. No, no like, we're doing Christ's work when we are a non-anxious presence in the world, just showing people an alternative story where there is peace, and there is joy, and there's contentment and there is love. That is the work of the Lord, right? That is 100% the work of the Lord.
Hey, I was thinking about, we've been talking a lot about the role of the customer service rep. I want to flip the tables a little bit, because there's a lot of people listening who are customer service reps like you. But there's also a lot of people listening who are CEOs, or leaders of divisions of their companies that are powered by customer service reps, who are believers. I'm curious, what can they do to bless the customer service reps in a distinctive Christ like way?
[00:30:37] RJ: Yeah. They can do a lot. In fact, I've worked for a number of companies without ever moving. Our bank kept being bought out by other banks. I've gone through that transition. I have seen differences in the top-down leadership. I've worked for companies where the directive from the top is productivity. They are not talking about customer service when they are talking about being productive. They're talking about making money, making sales, so, “Get them off the line as fast as you can, but try to transfer them to somebody who can upsell them,” that kind of thing. Currently, at least now, I'm very, very fortunate that I work for a company where the people at the top are totally aware of the customer. They want to do what's best for the customer and the stockholders and so on.
It really does set the tone for the people below them. Then the people below them can then set the tone for those below them and so on. Like I said, I've been in situations all along from the beginning. There's all this talk about servicing the customer. But the difference comes in, what are we getting from the top? What signals are we getting from the top about how important the customer is, and how much time we're supposed to spend on the phone trying to help them? If you've got leadership who is willing to bite the bullet and say, “We do have financial considerations we've got to remember, but that customer is important and we need to focus on them,” and they really mean that then they they'll do what they can to support the managers under them who also believe that. It can really make a difference throughout the company.
[00:32:20] JR: All right, Ron, you know the drill. We wrap up every episode with the same three questions. Number one, which books are you recommending or gifting most frequently these days?
[00:32:29] RJ: Well, Paul Tournier was a Swiss physician who wrote a number of books about his Christian faith as a physician and as a counselor and so on. My favorite one of those is something called, The Adventure of Living. He talks about how he believes that God birthed each one of us with an instinct for adventure and that that instinct is best lived out and expressed through our vocation.
[00:32:55] JR: Interesting. I’ve never heard of him.
[00:32:56] RJ: Yeah. That is a book that most people have not heard of, but it made a huge difference in my life. Another one that probably most people have not heard of, is a Bible study book by Cyril Barber, a guy who for a number of years, I think, was teaching at Fuller a Theological Seminary. It's a Commentary on the book of Nehemiah, but he relates it to daily life on the job, and lessons that we can learn from Nehemiah. Those are –
[00:33:22] JR: That’s great.
[00:33:22] RJ: That’s probably two books that I very heartily recommend.
[00:33:25] JR: I'm surprised I didn't hear you say Brother Lawrence's Practice of the Presence of God.
[00:33:30] RJ: Oh, well, yes. Yeah. Well, there are all kinds of – Yeah. The Imitation of Christ, too. Yes.
[00:33:37] JR: There you go. Yeah. I'm serious. I've been recommending your book, Customer Service and the Imitation of Christ. It's one of those books. I mean, there's not a lot of reviews on Amazon, right? It doesn't stand out on a search result page, but I read it. I'm telling you, I crushed it. I loved every word of it. I thought it was an exceptional book. Hey, Ron, who do you most want to hear on this podcast talking about how the gospel influences the work that Mere Christians do in the world?
[00:34:03] RJ: Well, I got a couple of ideas. Lowell Busenitz. His last name B-U-S-E-N-I- T-Z. Lowell Busenitz. He's a guy, used to work with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and so on. He teaches now at University of Oklahoma and he co-founded their center for entrepreneurship. He's got a book coming out in a few months called Soul Work. It's something near and dear to your heart. It's about entrepreneurship and I haven't read it yet, but I'm looking forward to that. That's supposed to come out in a few months. I think he would be an interesting guy for this program.
[00:34:33] JR: I’ll check him out.
[00:34:34] RJ: Another couple who works together. Laurie and Drew Fralick, last name is F-R-A-L-I-C-K. They lived in inner city Detroit and they co-pastor right now a planter church in Detroit, but they have just a very interesting story. Laurie works for – she helps marginalized populations. She does like contract work and things trying to help get organizations going, I guess in the inner city. Drew is a mental health counselor. They both, Laurie and Drew, used to live in China. They are both Christians who felt that God was working through them even while they were working in China. Incidentally, Drew is a stand-up comic and actually got the first comedy clubs started in China. Just very, very interesting people who I think you'd have a great time talking to.
[00:35:30] JR: Man. That's a great suggestion. First comedy club in China. Ron, what's one thing from our conversation you want to reiterate to our listeners before we sign off?
[00:35:40] RJ: Just that you don't want to miss the adventure. I almost did. I was going to go into really the cloistered life of being a college professor when I didn't even realize what was waiting for me here. There's an adventure out here. All you have to do is just ask God to be part of it. I’d hate for you to miss it.
[00:35:58] JR: Man. I love that. Ron, I just want to commend you for the terrific, Christ-like work you do, every day for the glory of God, the good of others. Thank you for reminding us that every good endeavor can be an opportunity to imitate Christ and show his love just like a very practical level day in day out. Thank you for showing us a glimpse of what that actually looks like, even in one of the hardest jobs in the world. Guys, I mentioned the book 100 times. I promise that there's no affiliate link here. I just love the book. It's called Customer Service and the Imitation of Christ by my new friend, the Ron Johnson. Ron, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:36:40] RJ: This has been great. Thanks for having me, Jordan.
[00:36:42] JR: Man, I hope that was an encouragement to you all. If it was, do me a favor and go leave a review of The Mere Christians podcast wherever you listen to the show. You'd be shocked at how important these reviews are, by the way. I'm not going to bore you with why, but just trust me when I say go into Spotify, go into Apple, wherever and leaving a rating and a review of the show is a big, big deal. I'd be so grateful for you guys doing that. Guys. Thank you so much for tuning in this week. I'll see you next time.
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