I never set out to write a book. I’m definitely no scholar. I never finished high school, and I have a hard time spelling my own name. But with dictation, I can make it happen. This devotional wasn’t written with pen and ink; it was written by dictation while I was driving down the road.
I’ve been in the shed industry since 2009. In 2019, I started doing wholesale and got my own hauling rig because I wanted to do it on my own and I was tired of building sheds. I’m not much of a talker; I mostly keep to myself if I can. But once I started hauling sheds and talking with customers every day, it started pulling me out of my shell.
Right about that same time, I had a dream/wake-up call. To make a long story short, God told me, “I want you to know the Bible as well as you know your iPhone.”
That scared me, because there isn’t much I don’t know about my iPhone. And every time I’d read the Bible, I’d find something new. I knew right then this wasn’t going to be a quick thing; it was going to be a daily journey.
I asked Jesus into my heart back in 2002, but I didn’t truly surrender my heart to Jesus until 2019. That’s when I started reading my Bible every day, not just on Sunday or Wednesday night. And what I found blew me away.
Before that, I mostly just went through the motions. If someone quoted Scripture, talked about God, or said they were a Christian, I just assumed they were good to go. But once I actually read the Bible for myself, I realized a lot of what I’d been taught and heard wasn’t lining up. The only way to heaven is through a personal relationship with Jesus, not church attendance, not denomination, not going through the motions.
I started sharing this with customers and people I talked with every day. And their reactions were eye-opening, because most folks were doing exactly what I used to do, just going through the motions.
This went on for quite a while. Every time I thought I believed something a certain way, I’d read the Bible again and realize I was wrong. It was humbling, but it was real.
Then one day, I was talking with a customer who really stuck with me. He was telling me how frustrated he was with church. His wife was a different denomination from him, so they were going to two different church services every Sunday morning. They were running all over the place and stressed out before the day even started.
We talked about it, and I tried to share the truth with him. But like most folks, he didn’t really want to hear it.
That conversation stuck with me. When I got home, I talked with my wife about it. And that one customer was actually the start of therulebreakers.org. It led to the first article I ever wrote, called “Rules Are for Fools.” That article is what started The Shed Hauler’s Journey.
I’ve got a lot of different stories from customers, but my wife encouraged me to take 30 of them and put them together into a devotional specifically aimed at shed haulers. It’s really easy to look at what we do every day as just a job, get the money, and move on. But shed haulers have a powerful position, whether we realize it or not.
In a lot of cases, customers buy a building online or over the phone. The delivery guy might be the only person they ever meet from the company. At the very least, we’re the last person they deal with. I know some folks don’t care about the customer and just want to drop the shed and be done with it, and sometimes that’s tempting. But what I found, especially doing wholesale, is that when you talk with someone from the beginning all the way to delivery, you end up feeling like you actually know them.
So why not share the love of Jesus with them?
One of my favorite quotes says, “Share the love of Jesus with everyone, and if necessary, use words.” It’s not always about what you say. It’s about how you act, your attitude, and how you treat people. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That’s why I decided to publish this devotional. This journey changed my life, and I believe every shed hauler could be encouraged by it.
It’s published on Amazon if you want a hard copy. I marked it down as low as Amazon would let me. Every purchase goes right back into printing more books.
We wanted it completely free, but that wasn’t possible through a publisher. Because of that, anyone can download it 100 percent free as an ebook or PDF from our website here: https://www.therulebreakers.org/the-shed-haulers-journey-devotional.
