9 to 5 Faith Podcast: Episode 1

Paige C. Clark

Welcome to nine to five faith. How to serve God while working for the man. I am your host. Paige C Clark, and I am so excited that you’re here joining us today. I’m happy if you are subscribing or listening to the first time. I’m just happy that you’re here to enter into this conversation that I think is so important and so needed. So why did I create this podcast? Why is this a passion project of mine? Why is this something that I know needs to be talked about in this space? Those are great questions. Let me answer them. I have worked full time in the corporate space for the past 10 years, 10 plus years, and I realized what a huge gap that there is between talking about faith and Christianity and working full time. Because if you think about it, and I’m speaking generally here, generally, people who work in ministry, they either that’s their full time job or they have never really worked in a secular workplace. They don’t really know what it’s like to have to balance both things together. And I think that when we’re listening to ministry leaders, while they have great, amazing, wise God given insight for how we need to live our lives, I found that sometimes there’s a disconnect between what the reality is for so many people who live out there and who clock in and clock out, who live hourly, who can’t take every single weekend off because they’re working. There’s a huge disconnect there, and I wanted this podcast to bridge that disconnect. I wanted to speak to people who are kind of your average everyday people, people who work for someone else, people who have to log into a computer, who have to commute to an office, because it is in that normalness or normality. It’s in that normal area that we find the most practical and applicable advice for how we practice our faith and how we balance it all, because it is difficult, it is confusing, and when I started my career, I was faced with a lot of these questions, and I didn’t know how to do it all. One of the things that I remember is when I got my first job offer, it was with a Christian company, kind of it was with a Christian institution, but you didn’t necessarily have to be Christian to work there. And I remember getting offered this job, and my instinct was to say, Let me pray about it, because that’s what I would do. I would consider a big life decision and take it to God and pray about it. And I realized very quickly that that was not a normal thing to say, especially in the workplace. So from that moment, from the very beginning of my professional career, I realized I’m like, Oh, I’m going to have to make some adaptations. I’m going to have to purchase a little bit differently, because this is not how normal corporate world operates. One thing that I also wanted to discuss on this podcast, and we’ll talk about in future episodes, is the legality of what we are allowed to say comfortably in the workplace. What will get us a little hand slapping by HR and what is allowed? What? What are the things Christians are allowed to say? How are we allowed to bring our faith into the workplace without violating workplace laws and freedom of speech laws and all of that? It’s complicated, and I feel like that. There’s also the stigma that comes with how we interact and how we apply our faith into the workplace. It’s it’s complicated and it’s hard, and it, I’d argue that it takes a level of boldness that people in other roles don’t necessarily have to deal with. I think that it, while it may be fairly normal for stay at home mom to talk about her faith, and definitely people who work in ministry to talk about their faith, it is a very. Taboo topic in the workplace, to talk about your faith, to bring it up, to tell someone you’re praying for them, to say that you volunteered somewhere at the on the weekends. All of that contributes to this kind of discomfort that we have that may be real or implied when it comes to how we live out our faith, and it’s not so simple as just bringing up Jesus, right? Because also, how often do those conversations come up? I work from home full time, and I noticed when I went from in person to at home full time, that the ability for those personal conversations have severely limited, that the opportunity to bring up Jesus, to bring up my faith, to talk about how I’ve been radically transformed by accepting Jesus as My lord and savior, I realized that those conversations have way less opportunity because there’s no water cooler talk. There’s no stopping by someone’s desk just to say, Hey, how’s it going? You talk a lot about lot less about your plans for the weekend, or what things you may be planning. And that approach is another really difficult obstacle for us, especially the people who are working from home. If you work from home, you hear me on this the they say a lot, especially when you’re talking about like workplace culture and kind of how it has evolved. They have said that people who work from home are a lot more productive because you don’t have those times where you’re just standing by someone’s desk talking, because sometimes that can go on for hours if you work from an office, you know what I’m talking about, a lot of times you could just can sit and talk and talk about life, talk about what’s hard, and that poses a lot more opportunity to implement and insert your faith, then just a teams call or a zoom call, or even just a Slack or a message, they the opportunities change a lot in that place. So that’s what we’re here to talk about. If you know anything about me, you know that I am incredibly practical. I don’t want to just give you fluff and stories. I want to give you actionable takeaways that you can go and apply to your life, things that you can listen to this and say, Yes, this is how I’m going to be moving forward. This is something that I’m going to take, that I’m going to start implementing a practice or a routine, or maybe you are even inspired by the boldness of some of these stories. I really hope that this is a resource to you, that you can share this with people who you might find in similar places. I hope that we go from here, you listen to the episodes, you subscribe for the new ones, because these conversations are some of my favorite conversations that exist. They are so life giving, and these people have so much value to share, and I can’t wait for you to hear a little bit more. So again, hit that subscribe button. Leave those five stars so other people can hear this podcast as well, and you guys, I will see you on the next episode. Bye.