3/5/25 - 2084: Your Story, His Glory

Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the voice of collaboration for the faith and work movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to inspire every workplace believer to recognize their workplace as their ministry place, where they work with God every day. What can that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: The power of story is unmatched by any other medium of communication. If it wasn't so powerful Hollywood would be irrelevant. So what about your story? Do people know your story? Do they know your whole story, including and especially when your life intersected with Jesus?

Do your kids know your story? Your grandkids, do your coworkers know your story? Sometimes it just takes a kick in the pants to get us to document our story, organize our story and get it written down. It's so important that your spiritual legacy is documented so that it's easier for you to reiterate when the time presents itself, and it's equally important for passing on to the generations to come. But how do you get started? Today we head off to Texas to talk with renowned memoir writer, Chad Harbour. He's going to tell us about his mission field from God. Chad Harbour, welcome to iWork4Him.

Chad Harbour: Thank you, Jim. Thank you, Martha. It's an honor and pleasure to be with you today.

Jim: All right. So Chad, we do this at every show for guests that are on for the very first time. Chad, what's your Jesus story?

Chad Harbour: Raised by two wonderful parents. They were devout Christians from the youngest time I can remember. We'd attend church every single Sunday, and then go to Ho Jo's afterwards.

Jim: Nice! That would be howard johnson's for those of you too young to know what Ho Jo's is.

Martha: That's right.

Chad Harbour: That's right. Thank you. Thank you.

Jim: They had those amazing ice cream sundaes it's all I remember about hojo's is after lunch they had chocolate fudge sundaes. All right, sorry

Chad Harbour: Stop it now. (laughter) Okay, so So, you know devout Christian myself, I didn't really become born again until I was in high school. I attended a revival in philadelphia with a good friend of mine and that's when I came to accept Jesus as my Lord and Savior. And I've been on the journey ever since, trying to be the best Christian I can and work for Him.

Jim: So at what point in time, you said in high school, was there a certain event that kicked you into gear in high school that said, Hey, I gotta make this my own faith.

Chad Harbour: It's a good question. And I just thought of this while you were asking it. My brother was a manager of a gas station when he was in college and I was the assistant manager. And back in the day, there wasn't that much traffic. So I opened up a Bible one day and started reading it from the New Testament, from front to cover, from front to end. And it really motivated me to really, think harder about my faith and how Jesus could be more inspiration to me and listen to his word, pray more. And that's when I decided to go to that revival in Philadelphia. And that's when I came to Christ.

Martha: That's so good. So we know that there is a lot of power, excuse me, power in telling stories. Where did you learn to help other people tell their stories?

Chad Harbour: As they say so often, it's all about the story. I started journaling when my first child was born 31 years ago, and I became a very passionate journaler. I journaled about my family, my dogs, my cooking, my, my faith. I journaled every little bit about the business I was in at the time.

And as I became more passionate about journaling I started helping people journal. I started writing stories for people. And I retired out of private equity at 50 years old. And I decided that I wanted to help other people more significantly tell their story. So I started a company where I write private memoirs and company history books for clients. So in the 31 years I've been doing this, I've written over 230 books for clients.

When I write these private memoirs for clients, there's chapters in the book. For example, grandparents, parents, childhood years, teenage years, college, military, career, getting married, kids. And there's also a chapter for those Christian clients I have called faith and in each chapter there's a bunch of questions that I can read and ask the question and then I type the answer that my client tells me under that question.

So it came to me one day, when I was running, God spoke to my heart. He goes: hey, you got this great chapter called Faith in your template when you interview your clients. Why don't you put that on a website? Why don't you have 16 chapters, have questions that are faith based questions on this website, in the cloud, on this platform, and then people can write their faith story, because nothing is more important than telling your faith story. Your spiritual life story. It's the most important thing we can do. It's the great commission. Jesus calls us to tell others about him and to bring people to Christ.

There's no other resource that I know of that allows you to do this in a platform where you can answer these questions about your faith in these 16 chapters and then print it as a book, and there you go. So spirituallifestories. com is an easy to use platform where subscribers can write their faith journey. Users can create a book.

Jim: I was going to say we learned from the Old Testament the power of passing on stories from generation to generation, because we know that Moses was the first one to write them down.

And by that point in time, the Israelites were 500 years old. The first time anybody wrote anything down in the Old Testament was Moses, right? Actually the story of Job, but Moses didn't write Job but the traditions to build a, pass on the histories from all of the Israelites from the beginning of time until the time of Moses, he had to capture all of that. Before that it was all verbal tradition, passing them on and passing them on. And frankly, I don't know how they didn't embellish more because that's what the Greeks did.

Martha: That's what you tend to do when you tell a story, right Jim? (laughter)

Jim: The stories just get better and better with years. These guys kept the stories to history.

Chad Harbour: So Jim, you're exactly right. The Bible is the greatest, the most popular, most bought book, given book in the world. What is the Bible? It's a bunch of people, apostles, disciples, prophets, telling the story that's inspired by God. Jesus was a great storyteller. To tell our story in the hopes that maybe something in your book that you write on spirituallifestories. com will inspire, motivate, encourage someone to come to Christ. Maybe there's a grandchild out there, a child who's a little wayward. They need to come back into the fold and reading his grandma, his mom, his dad's story from spirituallifestories. com. will help them get back on the Jesus path.

Martha: I love this, because as I think about our listeners and even ourselves, there are so many things in our families that we assume we've told everybody, right? But yet, we run that risk of not sharing some very important details. And I love that your experience of journaling that you did personally.

God prepared you for this season where you're helping other people. It makes me think of like when somebody hires a coach because they know they should exercise. They probably even know what exercises they need to do, but they don't do them on their own. And you're giving this tool that people can use in a way to take them on that journey that they really know that they should do or that they, it's a discipline that they'd like to take place, but they're not doing it.

And you are you're making that a possibility through the spirituallifestories. com. And I just love that. So can we talk now about how it works a little bit?

Chad Harbour: Sure. So it is a subscriber based model. So you can go to the site. There's a button at the top that says explore. It'll take you through the site. There's a video on there.

Jim: The site is spirituallifestories. com.

Martha: And we'll put that in the show notes for everybody.

Chad Harbour: So as Spiritual Life Stories allows you to write your faith based story. So you can sign up, you can create a book cover, you can answer these questions that are in 16 chapters, for example, in the grandparents chapter. What faith were your grandparents? What denomination? Did they take you to their church? Did they have a favorite Bible verses? Did they ever read a child's Christian book to you? So there's a bunch of questions like that in the Grandparents chapter. And each chapter has these faith based questions. So you can answer those questions you want.

You don't have to answer all of them. There's over 300 questions. . And you don't have to write. There's voice to text. Perfect for those saying, oh, I don't want to write, it takes too much time. I just hit a button on the screen that says talk now, and boom. It uses AI to write, to take your voice and create the text for you. Now you got to go back and look at the text to make sure it's accurate, but it's about 95 percent.

Jim: Or, if you want to keep it interesting for your kids, don't read it. That's why the game Mad Gap was so much fun. You had to figure out what people were telling. But this, and I want to get back to this in a second Chad, but we just, knowing that the power of story is so, it's gripping as I mentioned in the opening. I mean if story wasn't so powerful Hollywood would be irrelevant, which is an idea to make Hollywood irrelevant. (laughing) But there's been so many great things coming out of Hollywood. Look at the chosen series, taking the gospels and exploding them with story so that we can experience Jesus in a more full manner. Obviously they had to build story around it, but it helps you really understand the humanity of Jesus.

We've got a sponsor, we've got a supporter that's got an incredible story, and that comes along the powerful tool, and that story comes the story of SaferNet, a tool developed to protect every device that you've got every whether it's your phone or your your laptop or your iPad or any kind of tablet or your desktop. Yes, we still use all of those things.

SaferNet protects them with a VPN, website filters, antivirus protection 24/ 7. And just, Chad right now is calling in from a hotel in some unnamed city in Nevada. He wouldn't have to worry about all about connecting to the wifi there. That'd be wifi for those of you that don't understand. And he wouldn't have to worry at all if he had SaferNet because SaferNet keeps you hidden.

It's unbelievable. God's given SaferNet the ability to protect us so we can do the work we've been called to do. You can use SaferNet to help do that as well. SaferNet. com. That's SaferNet. com. Chad, unfortunately couldn't have Cindy Beckman join us today to share her story. She's been one of your clients that use the platform, the subscription platform, which by the way, when people hear the word subscription, they're thinking, Oh brother, this is going to be wicked expensive, but it's not, is it Chad?

Chad Harbour: I won't say it's cheap. Everybody thinks everything on the internet should be free. We've spent a lot of time developing this platform over the last three years. And I'm not going to say it's cheap, but if you think about your life story, your spiritual life story, I would hope that most people would agree that $ 100 for a two year subscription that also includes the first book free. So 100, two years. Subscription and the first book you print is free.

Jim: A hundred bucks. You can't even go out for dinner for four people for a hundred bucks anymore. And if you can't even go buy a couple dozen eggs for a hundred bucks anymore. You gotta take a loan out to get eggs. (laughter)

That's right. All right, so Cindy Beckman was gonna join us. She wasn't able to join us today. Tell us how Cindy got connected with spiritual life stories.com and how, tell us what some of her story that you think she would've told us.

Chad Harbour: She found out about me from either social media or some platform. And she just signed up and started writing a book and she texted me and said, Hey, I'm on this spiritual life story. I think you're the founder and I love it. I've been looking for something like this for years. It's easy to use, you can add pictures, you can print the book, and this is just what I needed, because I need to get my story out to my family.

And sure, I tell them about this and that, about my faith, but this really makes me think, and it helps me codify what is the most important thing in my life, and that's spiritual life stories. Or my faith, my story, sorry.

Martha: You know, it's encouraging when you hear somebody who's " I've been looking for/ this answers it." you gave us some examples of some of the questions that are asked, and I can see how valuable they are, because I tell you, it's been a long time since I've thought about what did my grandparents read to me, or did they take me to their church, which in fact they did, and I have a wonderful spiritual legacy through my grandparents.

But to be prompted, to be given those prompts that help you to record something that's lasting for the family. We were just talking about the pricing of the subscription. My goodness, what an easy Christmas gift. I just think like this is something that you can give to someone that can, you're giving a gift that's going to last for generations.

Jim: And since there's less than 10 months of shopping until Christmas, you could get signed up today at spirituallifestories. com. Get it done and get it printed in time for Christmas 2025.

Martha: That's awesome.

Jim: Chad did not pay me to say that, just so you know, I just thought of that on my own.

Chad Harbour: I'll give a donation.

Jim: Okay, iWork4Him. com forward slash donate.

Chad Harbour: Yeah, I saw that and you can add as I said, you can add pictures in here and you know It's also a button you can hit that says I want to gift this to someone, you type in their name, their email and they get an email says. Hey It's Chad here. I just signed you up. I've paid for your subscription. So here you go. Go get them.

Martha: Awesome. So that takes care of the gifting right there. Everybody can get ready for Christmas 2025.

Jim: I love that you can add pictures. Not only can you talk to text it, but you can add pictures, because pictures are worth a thousand words, they say. But also when you have a picture book, it's easier to read it.

Martha: Yeah, that's so neat.

Chad Harbour: They do say that a photo is worth a thousand words, but I started journaling because God spoke to my heart. He said hey, maybe it's a thousand words that makes the picture.

Jim: You know when you read, those pictures come to your head. I mean you start developing - I'm an avid fiction reader. I've read thousands of fiction books over my lifetime and you get into that universe when you're reading that story. It's, you can imagine it, you can live it, you can feel the emotions, that's what's beautiful, and that's what's so powerful about hearing other people's stories, right Martha?

Martha: And we love hearing other people's stories, and that is really what started iWork4Him. When we were sharing our story and our experiences of connecting our faith and work and starting to hear other people share their stories of how God was showing them purpose in their work.

And you can listen to our podcast on whatever that favorite platform is that you're listening on right now. Or if you're watching this on YouTube, I just want to encourage you to subscribe to stay in touch and hear more amazing stories every week. We are so grateful for you tuning in and hearing stories like Chad's.

Chad Harbour: So Chad, you are equipping other people to share their whole life story. Have you ever written your story in book form?

Let me reach over here. Excuse me a little bit. Here is the book. (showing book to camera) Now I'm going to put out a number of volumes of it.

Martha: Okay.

Chad Harbour: But can you see it?

Martha: Yes, we can.

Chad Harbour: My life story. So this is volume one of my book. And you see it's my life story. And so one unique thing we do in this in our platform is we have a table of contents. And because we're not going in to edit the person's material, we're not going in to modify it, embellish it, so essentially the platforms has a question. And then you type or voice detects the answer, and that question and answer is then put into the book, like this.

Jim: Nice. And what you're looking at, in case you're not on YouTube and you're listening to it on a regular podcast platform - you should go out to YouTube and check it out iWork4Him on YouTube - but you can see, it takes all those words spoken and puts them in book form. So Chad, how many pages is volume one of Chad Harbour's story?

Chad Harbour: Ha, I think it's 375.

Jim: Oh my word. Now, have any of your kids read it yet?

Chad Harbour: I'd say yes. They kinda live remote from me and I need to get it to 'em but I wanted to show you something else. So there are my grandparents.

Jim: Oh, nice. A color picture in there.

Chad Harbour: Yeah, there's the picture of them. And as you can see, there's my Harbour grandparents. So you have a question and you have an answer, question, answer. And um, it's just a wonderful thing to be able to do for your family.

So if you think about it, what do we do all day? We call our kids. We talk to our friends. We tell them what we did today. We tell them a joke. We tell them what Netflix show we're watching. We're texting our family. We're texting about this and that. We spend a lot of time all day long talking and texting and doing these things to communicate. Why don't we tell our faith story? It's the most important thing we can do. It's the number one thing in our life. Jesus is our number one thing. How are we going to tell other people about our faith in hopes that we can bring more people to Christ?

This is hopefully the platform that allows people to do that, to engage in writing their faith story. And hopefully someone reads their book, a family member who might be a little sideways, and brings them back to Christ.

Jim: So talk about that deal, Chad. Somebody goes on to spirituallifestories. com. How much are they going to pay? How long do they have to get the book written?

Chad Harbour: Okay. So it's 100 for a subscription. You have two years to write your story. I wrote mine in about four days. The first volume. Most people will take four months, but okay. That's what I do. I'm a writer. But you have two years. And you get the first book printed free.

Jim: Nice. Nice.

Chad Harbour: And you don't have to answer all the questions. You answer those questions that you feel are germane to you and that you want to answer. And let me mention something else. This is what's really powerful to me. When I was answering these questions, I really felt that the Holy Spirit was working in me and helping me answer the questions.

Because I get on a question and say, I'm not sure what I'm going to say. And then I just start typing and then start typing and it would come to me. . And I really believe that when you engage in a platform like this, where you're talking about your faith and you're hoping that it inspires and motivates and encourage other people, that the Holy Spirit is working in you.

Martha: . Amen. Amen.

Jim: And we're hopeful that this will inspire everybody listening to document your story because your story needs to be documented. We documented our story in a little bit of it in iWork4Him, in our book, iWork4Him, and Martha's dad's story is documented in both iWork4Him and iRetire4Him. Martha's story is documented even more in sheWorks4Him.

So we've done this, but we'd like you, our listeners, to document your story. Do it for your children, your grandchildren, your great grandchildren, the ones you may never even meet. Do it for your neighbors. Do it for the people that you went to college with. Get your story out there. We found this resource. We want to make sure you knew about it. We want you to meet Chad Harbour. Go to spirituallifestories. com. Chad Harbour, thanks for bringing this resource to iWork4Him.

Chad Harbour: I appreciate your time. God bless you both and iWork4Him too.

Martha: Awesome.

Jim: You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers, our workplace, it's our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him.