Chella Subram: Cornerstone Engineering is an engineering consulting company.
Becca Dyer: So we're a structural engineering firm. We do a lot of consulting and design work.
Chella Subram: I started the company, I believe God instructed me to start. Yeah. I mean, without faith this company wouldn't exist. It is an integral part of everyday walk. So we pray for our employees every day, pray for our company, pray for the decisions that we make every day, that it'll glorify God. If you really believe in God that God is the God of the family, then you got to believe in he's the God of business also. There is no dichotomy. To me it's how I run the family is how I run my business. There is no separation, so it's not hard for me.
Becca Dyer: Yeah, I feel like it's very active here. I feel very encouraged by the people that are my bosses. They are very, not only encouraging to me to be a better engineer, but to be a better person.
Todd Hasley: And I think that's where you've got to put your faith into practice. It's got to come down to where meets the road.
Chella Subram: When we hire, we don't tell them we're Christians and you need to be a Christian or anything like that. That would not be good. We want others, people of other faith also to come in here and experience peace and working in this environment.
Becca Dyer: I think it's very important. I learned something in college from my campus ministry that I went to at Auburn. Something that was really big was this idea of what is your vocation? Am I going to be an engineer who happens to be a Christian or am I going to be a Christian that happens to be an engineer? Small parts of your week being dedicated to God? Well, what if your whole life was dedicated to God and you just happen to be doing all these other things in between?
Todd Hasley: It's important to the functioning of the company, the success of the company, because a true success is not the bottom line like we talked about, but it's for a believer. It's how we're honoring the Lord and where he is placed us.
Chella Subram: It's hard for me to imagine a business without faith personally because I believe he helps us in everything that we do.
Becca Dyer: We've talked about in our Bible studies here before, how many hours, like we've written it out on a board, like engineers calculating it out. How many hours a day or how many hours a week do you spend sleeping? Do you spend eating? Do you spend at work? And work is by far the most. Those are the people you spend the majority of your time with. So if God's not in the workplace, that's a majority of your week. That's gone. That's not God's.
Chella Subram: So we actually at Cornerstone, we believe that we are put on earth to serve God by serving others that are around us. So we take that seriously. It's all part of God's kingdom. We as human beings separated, like secular and sacred. There is no such separation.
Becca Dyer: I guess having the confidence from the people who run this company and their faith, the confidence that they portray kind of allows me to help portray the confidence that I have in my faith to people that aren't in our Bible studies or aren't leading prayers when we eat together and those kinds of conversations can happen a little more organically. They're constantly saying, how can we do our job to better the overall outcome of the project? Not how do we get more money? They have a bigger motivation than just themselves. I don't know. It's very encouraging for people, especially people with a religious background or have some sort of Christian faith to see people above them doing that work. I think Cornerstone's done it really well where it's not forced, but it is very prevalent. It's very obvious what our faith is.
Chella Subram: And the assignments. Even though we do engineering and construction, it's not like directly immediately helping somebody on the face, but then it's when our structure is constructed and functioning, we do a lot of water treatment plants and wastewater treatment plants and all of those. It helps the overall community, everybody. So we take that seriously. Ultimately, it's benefiting the people that God created and we take pleasure in doing that.
