Bite Size Talks 2019	

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ASI Pacific Union

Sebastien Braxton

Be the Hope in the Workplace

I'm typically known for preaching the gospel, which is also a privilege.

So anyway, I'm typically known for preaching, but people did not know that early on in my Adventist experience, I was a part of several ministries, campus and GYC and other organizations, and realizing that there were a lot of self-supporting ministries that were actually not self-supporting.

So they needed donors, they needed somebody who was bankrolling what they were doing, and if ever that individual decided, you know what, we don't wanna give to your ministry this year, we're ready to give to a different ministry.

All of a sudden you had to lay off people, Things did not last.

And so when I came into the church, it was in the middle of my collegiate career.

And so I decided when I went back to finish my degree after being baptized, because I became Seventh-day Adventist in college while I was doing an engineering degree.

And long story short, I went back to study business because I understood that for some reason in our church, we're very terrible at business.

And especially in the health field, physicians are very smart when it comes to medicine, but they're not good business people.

Because it's hard to tell a crying patient, please get your insurance and pay what you owe.

Oh, but doc, you know, I got this terrible cyst and it's painful and I don't know if I can work and the doctor's gonna be like, okay, it's fine, you know, you're not gonna make any money and you're gonna go out of business.

Long story short, I studied business, got my bachelor's degree in finance and entrepreneurship, and then I got a master's degree in communications because I also feel this is a place where we also fail as a church.

Communications is where our message is packaged in a way that the world can understand.

When I first became Seventh Day Adventist, coming from a hip-hop culture, urban life, people are like, yeah, are you redeemed?

I've never used that word in my entire life.

You know, the resurrection, all these different theologies, are you born again?

And so a big part of the block, oftentimes, in reaching out is how we communicate, how we create meaning of the ideas that we hold true, and how do we package it in a way that the person who is non-Adventist, that didn't grow up in our culture, singing our songs, knowing the sermons and the historical preachers that have passed to our church, how do we package it in a way that they understand exactly what we understand it to be?

I translated this into what I got into with health.

And so we started off with this idea of hope for change.

And the idea of hope for change is because the world right now is suffering suffering a lot I've had focus groups with several different people especially in my part of the United States in the south who are grappling with chronic lifestyle diseases and diseases probably many of us have never heard of that are just complication upon complication.

Not 1 of those focus groups ends with a dry eye.

People not sure if they're gonna be there when their child graduates high school because their doctor says, if you don't get this diabetes under control, you won't be there when your daughter turns 17.

You won't be there when your son graduates middle school.

So it became very clear to me that 1 of my former employees said, Sebastian, why are you doing this?

Why are you doing this and all the work and all the difficulty?

Because it's an uphill battle what our health message is to the world.

I said, when you go to those focus groups and you look at the transcript and you listen to the audio of these people talking, how can you walk away from that?

How can you not say, Lord, could you use my abilities, my know-how, my business sense, my passion for outreach, my ability to communicate in such a way that can impact this situation.

That's really what our health message was all about from the very beginning.

It was about reaching people in the most sensitive part of their lives.

And in reaching them in that part of their lives, we were able to create open doors for the gospel.

So easy to talk to them about God at that point.

Because the trust, the confidence, Christ's method was already implemented into the very service of health.

So this is why we always operate on this paradigm, is to give people hope for change.

There was a gentleman that wrote a book called The Upstreamist.

He tells a story which is commonly known among public health circles about the young people that went swimming by a river.

And when they went swimming by this river, all of a sudden, they saw a child heading towards the waterfall.

And as this child was heading toward the waterfall, any good human being would jump in and swim and try to save this child.

So as they jumped in, they realized as they grabbed that 1, there were 3 others that were coming.

Now swimming in a river is difficult work because you're swimming against the current.

So as they're doing this, they're getting winded, and all of a sudden they see more children coming down the river.

So now they start inventing little things with branches and ways to, hey, maybe we can grab 3 of them and pull them at 1 time.

They're using their ingenuity to find ways to save these kids.

But it just keeps growing in the number of kids coming down the river towards the waterfall.

All of a sudden, they realize they're actually working shorthanded, because 1 of their friends decided to swim upstream, the opposite direction.

Aren't you going to help us save these kids?

Because no matter how hard they tried, there were still kids that went over the precipice.

But they just congratulated themselves that the ones that they could save, they did save.

The friend yelled back to them, I'm going upstream to stop whatever's throwing these kids in the river in the first place.

When we deal with the fact that medicine right now is not upstream, it is creating new branches to save people already heading towards the precipice, rather than going upstream to figure out What's throwing these people down the river towards the waterfall of death?

Kaiser Permanente is already there in terms of preventative medicine.

They're rewarding physicians, they're rewarding practices, they're rewarding products and services that are anticipatory.

But here we are coming to you way after, and you look at any Adventist health facility, and I'm not trying to blast, so I'm not gonna name names, because people are gonna come looking for me.

I heard what you said at bite-sized talks, but listen, I didn't come here just to speak to you all.

I came here to speak on behalf of the people that I serve, because I hear their pain and that pain is real.

And so to keep it 100, we come and we set up facilities that catch people on the end of life.

By the time you get to 1 of these Adventist health centers with all these different remedies and all these different things, they're already on the edge where medicine can't help them.

And we saved some, but the reality is for some of them, it was way too late.

So the whole goal of the new life was how can we be upstream?

Michael Greger, he posts 1 of these statistics.

He says, 8% of Americans can say yes to these 5 statements.

I exercise 30 minutes or more, most of the time.

I eat a healthy diet of 5 fruits and vegetables a day.

I have 2 or fewer alcoholic drinks per day.

I can guarantee you most of us in this room can't say yes to all 5 of these.

And most of us, we may say, well, I'm vegetarian, doesn't mean you're getting 5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day.

You might be doing pretty well on, you know, Loma Linda veggie links and whatever else.

You're like, oh, I've got soy this and, you know, tofurkey that.

But we're not we're vegetarian but we not eating vegetables.

Number 2 we put so much emphasis on nutrition we don't even understand exercise and how the body moves.

If I put you in a fitness center, it's like putting a person in the Library of Congress and they're illiterate.

There's no benefit because you're in a gym but you're not movement literate.

You're going to squat and you're going to hurt yourself.

You're going to try to run on the treadmill, you're going to hurt your ankle because you don't know how to run properly.

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Be the Hope in the Workplace

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