Over a year ago, I shared that I’d had a dream where God basically told me to write about the things I know. He was gently putting me in my place. I’d been trying to discover great spiritual truths through my writing, and God dismissed all of that with one of those vocal utterances I can’t spell for the life of me—an “eeuh,” I suppose—the kind that comes with squinting, a puckered face, a shrug of the shoulders, and a hand tilting back and forth to communicate iffy at best.

So I’ve written a bit more about things I know, and this is going to be another one of those posts—well, sort of. I can’t help myself sometimes; I’ll probably dip my toes in the iffy-at-best stuff even here. But the iffy stuff should be obvious, so I’m proceeding anyway.

I have the great pleasure of serving as a customer success manager for a state government agency. I’m part of a group of customer success managers who are mostly way cooler and less nerdy than I am. This group reminds me of the time I visited the University of Florida to check out their grad program in social psychology. The social psych students there were the cool ones—they actively engaged with me, took me out, and made me feel truly welcome, and the whole time I was thinking how much I’d like to fit in. I’m not quite sure how a wall-weed like me ended up as a customer success manager, but I take it as a blessing.

Here, let me anticipate your duh: yep, a customer success manager’s job is to ensure the success of their customers. What that means depends on who your customers are and the nature of your business. In the state, it means helping agencies fulfill their mission—their reason for being, so to speak—and helping agency leadership realize their vision for how they’re hoping to improve things. On the day-to-day front, we approve purchases and have lots of meetings to align efforts, resolve issues, move things forward, monitor progress, and keep various stakeholders in the loop. Do I do a good job with all of this? …Not really. But I have a great team that has my back and makes me look good even when I’m treading water.

There’s one thing about the job that drives me a little crazy, though I get why we do it: we fill out customer satisfaction forms for our customers. You read that right—we, not our customers, fill out the customer satisfaction forms. Why? Well, folks get a little perturbed if you survey them to death. That, and high-level administrators have better things to do than fill out forms. And finally, my leadership wants to trust that I’m so in tune with my customers that I can serve them better. If they aren’t happy about something, I need to see it and be honest about it. That’s the first step toward addressing the problem.

This brings me back to God. One of the most important themes in the Bible is the relationship between human beings and God. In fact, you could make a compelling argument that the Bible is about that relationship—how it has evolved, been strained at times and strengthened at others, and brought out the best and worst of us. Especially in the New Testament, the relationship is often portrayed as father and children. Jesus wants us to have that kind of intimate relationship with God—the kind he had.

We picture that relationship in lots of ways: Creator and created, Father and children, Master and servants. Each one adds a little texture—a different angle on who God is to us and who we are to him. But I wonder if many of us, in our consumer-oriented societies, should open our minds to one more angle: God as our customer, and us as his service providers. And before you get your shorts in a bunch about how I’ve reduced God to an economic model, let me explain what I’m thinking.

When my daughter was younger, one of the things I truly cherished was her artwork. She’s a good artist, and she often created drawings in daycare or school that made their way home. Twenty-some years later, I still have many of them. As she got older and had some money of her own, she started asking me what I wanted for Christmas or my birthday. My answer was always the same: how about a drawing? In reality, that was more costly for her—in precious childhood time—than simply buying something. But it’s truly what I wanted. I didn’t need any gifts from my daughter. I wanted her creations, made especially for me.

When my son was younger, we sometimes assembled things together. Once he was old enough to read and interpret the instructions, I let him take the lead in figuring out and communicating the assembly steps. Occasionally we didn’t get things quite right and had to hit the undo button a few times, but he always did an excellent job leading us to eventual success. Indeed, long before I became a customer success manager, my young son was a role model to me of humility and persistence—of proactively admitting and correcting failures so we could succeed together.

So what’s the common theme here? At times, parents can see themselves as customers of their children’s products and services. And I’d argue this perspective resonates most when our children use their unique talents and character in these efforts, and when they put extra time into the task. Think about it: even a paid chore shifts from an employment-like situation to a customer-service-like one when your child proactively puts in extra time, or tries a different approach to make the result better for you.

When our children are customer-oriented with us—and then with others—we feel pride. Really, the only good kind of pride. They give us extra confidence in their character and extra faith in their efforts. Of course, we still love them when they aren’t customer-oriented (let’s just say there were some challenging Dunkin customers in my kids’ past), but that customer focus makes a difference in how we see them and our investments in them.

Well, doesn’t it stand to reason that if we feel good about our children being customer-focused with us, God might feel good when we’re customer-focused with him?

So how can we be customer-focused with God? Let’s learn from our children. When they try to understand what we want and then give it to us, they’re being customer-focused. We can do the same with God: try to understand what he wants, and then deliver it.

What does God want? That’s a question that deserves a lifetime of discovery, but I see three good starting points:

1. The Creation Story in Genesis 1. God created a lot of things and then called them good. Clearly, God wants these things. So it’s pretty obvious that anything we can do to protect, preserve, and heal them is going to please him.
2. The Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5–7. Even if you don’t believe Jesus was in some sense God, you may yet see what God wants in the timeless teachings of Jesus. Read the verses, then watch the BibleProject’s Sermon on the Mount Summary, and then read the verses again. Then consider the deep-dive podcast with Tim and Jon from the BibleProject team. (If you stick it out to the 28th episode, there’s a nugget in there that will choke you up. Don’t jump ahead, though.)
3. The Parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25:31–46. Here the King—whom you can take to represent God—identifies himself with the hungry, the thirsty, the stranger, the sick, and the imprisoned. Know what they want, and you’ll know at least part of what God wants.

Wouldn’t it be interesting to hand God a customer satisfaction survey and see what he says—and how he rates us? Or, just as I do for my customers now, to try to fill it out on his behalf? I don’t want to be a downer, but I don’t think I’d be checking the Satisfied box. It would be a little like discovering your Instacart shopper had kept all the fresh produce for themselves and left you the out-of-stock slips. Really, it’s much worse than that, but you get the idea.

Here’s the thing, though. Remember why we fill out those surveys in the first place. It isn’t to wallow. A low rating isn’t the end of the story—it’s the first step toward addressing the problem. The whole point of being honest about where a customer is unhappy is that, once you see it clearly, you can finally do something about it.

So maybe that’s the real invitation hiding in this whole exercise. Not to feel guilty about a bad score, but to get curious and customer-focused—to ask, the way my kids learned to ask me, what does he actually want?—and then go deliver it. Protect and heal the good things he made. Live the upside-down way of the Sermon on the Mount. Feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, visit the imprisoned, and meet God there.

Come to think of it, that may be exactly what God was getting at in my dream. Write—and live—the things you know. And I’m pretty sure I know at least this much: God is a customer worth satisfying.