From Rock Bottom to Renewal: A Story of Faith and Redemption | Bryan Crouch

I’ll go back to Philippians 4:6-7: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need and thank Him for all He has done. Then you will experience God’s peace.”

So that means, basically, the more time you spend with God, the more peace you’re going to feel. When you can’t pay the bills, when a spouse leaves you, when all these crazy things happen in your life—you’ll have a peace that goes beyond understanding. What does that mean? It’s a peace that doesn’t make sense. It’s just a peace that doesn’t make sense.

These are the things I love witnessing to people in the workplace about. Whenever they ask about my diabetes or say, “Hey, tell me a little bit about yourself,” I’m like, “Glad you asked!”

Like I said, the first 44 years of my life I spent for Brian; the next 44 years, I’m going to spend for Him. He’s all mine, man, and I’m all His—and both, I guess.

But you know, I don’t think we realize in the marketplace how powerfully we can be used when we have Jesus inside of us. I really don’t think we comprehend that the Spirit of God literally lives inside of us. And what does that mean? If we put Him first and think from that identity—think from victory, not from a victim’s mentality—that’s where the devil wants you. He wants you to feel like a loser, to feel like you’re not enough. But you are enough. God made you. He lives inside of you, and He wants to use you. I want to be used by Him.

Then there’s unconditional love, which is kind of the hardest one. We all have clients, right? You know, there are some of those—when the phone rings, you’re like, “Ugh…” I work in IT, man, trust me, there are tons of them! There are great ones, and there are not-so-great ones, but we need to love people the same way that Jesus loved people. I try to think, where would Jesus be today, with all the crazy stuff going on in society? That’s one reason people hated Him. He was in places where He “shouldn’t have been.”

I feel like a lot of churches and ministries today are “fishing in an aquarium.” We’re saving people that have already been saved. We’re preaching to people who—I’ll be honest—don’t really need it. I mean, everybody needs it, but you know what I’m saying. We’re not reaching the lost. We’re not going out. This is a broken world, and I feel like the workers are very few, and the harvest is plentiful. In the workplace, we have a responsibility—not to go out with an end-is-near sign—but to just live your life in a way where people look at you and say, “There’s something different about that person. What is it?” And whenever they ask, you can say, “Glad you asked!”

One of my favorite movies I used to watch with my son was The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith. You guys know that movie, right? There’s a part where Will Smith’s character is in his internship, and the president of the company rolls up in this crazy car. Will Smith looks at him and says, “What do you do, and how do you do it?”

As Christians, people need to be looking at us and saying, “Who do you know, and how do you know Him?” That’s the poise we need to have. We need to be set apart. We’re supposed to be different. We’re not supposed to blend in with the rest of society and conform—that’s easy. I’m addicted to doing the hard things now.

Chris, you know this—we talked about this when I started immersing myself. I have an hourly reminder on my watch, every single hour, that says, “Talk to God.” Every hour on the hour. Some days, I’m like, “Okay, yeah, I get it,” and swipe it away, but it builds that habit, that mindset. Every time I see it, sometimes I’ll stop and pray for 5 minutes; sometimes I’ll be too busy and swipe it, but I’m thinking about it. After three, four, five weeks of doing that, it builds a habit where you’re talking to God all the time.

And yeah, you may seem like a crazy person, but I don’t care. It doesn’t matter if people think I’m crazy. It’d be crazy to choose this world over eternity—that’s what’s crazy.

So you just have to build those little habits within yourself. If you do something for two or three weeks, and then do that for a year—this is what I’ve done. It’s ridiculous! When I’m brushing my teeth, I’m praying. It sounds silly, but it’s cool. I’m talking to God all the time. When you do that, your mind is open, and you start to see these wide-open doors of opportunity to speak to and reach people—especially in the marketplace.