Jasper Ventures

[00:00:00] Are you building your kingdom or God’s kingdom? You find the answers to this question quickly when you’re told you’re going to die. So

when my dad started the company in 1992, he started it as Engineering Procurement and Construction, uh, also known as EPC. And then later on, when I came in, in 2016, I started the process of reorganizing the companies. So in 2016, we created Jasper Ventures. Had been in the oil and gas industry for 22 years.

I just did not feel like the company that I worked at treated people fairly. I didn’t really feel like that they honored God with their company. One of my primary goals, whether it was a success or not, was to honor God. I [00:01:00] actually got to be one of the first employees. Um, as I was going to college, I would come between classes.

And, uh, just spend time at the office, help them with any administrative duties they had. The city,

I noticed when I left. I had a pain. I got back from the road trip on Friday and made the appointment. I told him about the pain. He examined my eye. He wanted a brain MRI, and so he set it up for the next day. MRI showed a spot on my brain that didn’t look good. They leaned very heavily towards the fact that it was a very serious condition.

brain tumor, but it was not conclusive. They had to do surgery. So the first surgery, uh, they removed the tumor in May of 2005. They did the biopsy and it [00:02:00] was what they suspected. It was called a glioblastoma multiforme, which is automatically a stage four cancer. The statistics, uh, basically probably less than 10 percent survival possibility.

In September, My oncologist, who was my next door neighbor, came over to the house and told me that the tumor was coming back. It was very discouraging. At that point, I didn’t know whether it would be worthwhile to get another surgery or not, because, you know, based on the statistics, I didn’t know if I’d be around for a year.

I was working Louisiana at the time, and, um, had just given birth to my daughter. I remember thinking to myself that my daughter would never know her poppy. My son was a freshman in high school, so I was sad but I was

thankful that I had an older grandson that would remember what a great man he was [00:03:00] and what a difference he had made in so many people’s lives.

When I went to college, I kind of just went my own direction and even when my dad was diagnosed with cancer, I was very much not walking with the Lord and, and also Having a lot of personal problems myself because of that. Just like a lot of people who’ve had a conversion experience or even exposure to the church, you find yourself in a, in a place where it feels like rock bottom and fall to your knees and pray.

I mean, I honestly found myself on my knees praying that, that my dad would survive. I followed up with my oncologist at Baylor. So by this time, I was doing annual MRIs and every time that we went, uh, she said, it looks good. There’s no recurrence. It looks like it’s dead, but she never did say that I’m cancer free until January of 2018.

Dad was [00:04:00] diagnosed with a, with a cancer that not very many people survive with. I truly view that as a miracle that, that he survived and that he’s, you know, in this office today. I think it makes you not take for granted the time that you have. We have to use each day as if we’re not going to have the next day.

We have to love him and we have to love others. That’s what we’re called to do. And we can do that right here in the marketplace in a really big way. I think that loving and caring for employees in the business world is foreign because not a lot of people are doing it. I think it’s easy to, to be fearful of, you know, what it looks like, but, I mean, we were created to love and to be loved.

We had, we had a good culture, but we didn’t have a mission, vision, or value statement. We lived out values, but we didn’t really say what those values were. And so we really began to put [00:05:00] some structure to Making sure that not only we understood what we were doing, but all of our employees understood why we were doing it.

I think there’s a mentality that there’s a job to do and that’s what we do, and then we go home and, and our home life is our personal time, and our home life is where we’re gonna, we’re gonna love and care for our families and our friends and those sorts of things, but why can’t we do that in the workplace?

We used to always say in HR, and I hated this, you leave your personal life at home and You leave your work at work and don’t cross the two. And it’s really a crazy thing to say, because it’s really impossible. We want them to feel like we

care about them as a whole person. Not just for what they can do for us here at work, not for what they can produce.

But we want to care for them through prayer, physically. We want to care for them emotionally. We want to care for them in whatever way they’ll [00:06:00] allow. Building cryogenic natural gas plants, but we’re also spreading the gospel and spreading, uh, you know, the kingdom of God on earth. Working for God, no matter what I’m doing in my career, whether it’s marketing, drafting, it doesn’t matter.

I can do every bit of that to the glory of God. You can just tell there’s a different kind of people that are here. It’s a different breed of people and it’s a different kind of atmosphere here because they really love and care about their people. I’m a children of God. We start eternal life here on earth.

We’re all called as Christians to invest in the kingdom with our lives every day. I think that he gave us this business right here as our ministry. This is Psalm 115, Warren. It says, Not to us, O Lord, not to us, but to your name give glory for the sake of your [00:07:00] steadfast love and your faithfulness. It’s not about us.