From Amazon to Mission Fields: How Abel Jimenez Learned That Obedience Is the Only Strategy That Works

The Message He Didn't Want to Hear

Abel Jimenez has spent his career helping organizations navigate change. He has led large-scale transformations across technology, supply chain, and organizational design. He knows how to read a system, find the gaps, and build a path forward. But the most pivotal moment in his professional life had nothing to do with a client engagement or a strategy deck. It started with a message from God — and a decision to ignore it.

That decision cost him everything he had built on the side. And it gave him something far more valuable in return.

Today, Abel is the founder of SGA Praxis — a consulting firm built on the principles of structure, governance, and automation — and a growing voice in the Kingdom Factor Collective. His story is not a tidy testimony of faith leading to success. It is something more honest, more useful, and more true to the way God actually works in the lives of leaders who are willing to be shaped.

Built for Transformation

Abel's professional background reads like a map of organizational complexity. Over the course of his career, he worked across GE, Schneider Electric, and a range of companies where he helped leaders turn strategy into action. Project management, change management, technology implementations — he has touched them all. What he was really doing, he now understands, was being trained.

"We're all in a journey to a much better destination," Abel says. "As believers of Jesus Christ, we're here to be trained for what we're going to be doing in eternity. That's how I'm looking at things now."

That perspective did not come easily. It was forged through a series of hard lessons, the most instructive of which began with a startup that went badly wrong.

Obedience on His Own Terms

Years ago, Abel worked for a startup that he describes without hesitation as a painful experience. People were hurt — financially and emotionally. Abel was among them. He made a firm decision: he would never work with that company or its leadership again.

Then God told him to go back.

Not to the people, exactly — but to the technology. Abel felt a clear and repeated prompting that God wanted him to help bring this product to remote areas of the world where it could genuinely serve people. He resisted. He argued. And then, in a move that he describes with a slight laugh, he found what he believed was a compromise.

"I said, I need to be obedient. So I created a company — that way it's kind of separated; there's legal separation. They get to have the product brought to market by me, and I follow God's command. Everyone wins!"

He reached out. They never responded. And so Abel, holding a newly formed business entity and no clear direction, made a pivot. He turned to e-commerce — reselling products through Amazon and Walmart. At its peak, he was managing $150,000 in inventory and generating four to five thousand dollars in profit each month. It was working. And then he found the heaters.

The Frozen Account

A donation bin at a Habitat for Humanity store held brand-new baseboard heaters, marked down to around fifty dollars each. The same heaters were selling on Amazon for five hundred. Abel bought them, listed them, and watched them move quickly. But Amazon requires sellers to document a verifiable chain of custody for their products. Abel knew a receipt from Habitat for Humanity would not satisfy that requirement. Rather than walk away, he tried to protect his profitable product.

"I lied. Not only did I write up a fake invoice and send it to Amazon — I made is seemed the customers were getting a great deal by reducing the seller price significanly. I knew what I was doing. But I justifed it by telling myself "I'm helping others. I'm helping Habitat for Humanity by buying from them. I'm helping Amazon make money. I'm helping the customer get a huge discount/savings. And I'm helping myself through the profit. Everyone wins!"

Amazon flagged the account. His inventory was destroyed. His selling privileges were permanently revoked. And a significant financial investment disappeared.

"It doesn't matter how small the action is," Abel says now. "It should always be the right action. The authority has been placed there by God, and we need to submit ourselves to that — even when it's inconvenient, even when it feels harmless."

What strikes Abel most when he tells this story is not the money he lost. It is the sequence that led there. He had received a genuine calling. He obeyed it partially, on his own terms. When that path closed, he redirected the resources God had given him toward his own ambitions. And when the pressure came, he chose deception over integrity.

"I use the company I created from that calling and started it from greed. That has been a lesson I now carry into everything."

The Plank and the Splinter

The Amazon story is the dramatic version of a pattern Abel had been working to break throughout his career. Early on, professional advancement came first. Relationships were expendable if they stood between him and the next milestone. Conflict was buried rather than addressed.

Faith changed that calculus entirely.

"Instead of keeping my mouth shut and building a huge story in my head, I go and directly talk with the individual I'm having a conflict with," he says. "I take the plank out of my own eye first before talking about the splinter in somebody else's."

This is not a small shift. In environments where everything moves fast and relationships feel transactional, choosing honesty over self-protection is genuinely countercultural. For Abel, it is also deeply biblical — and it has become one of the defining marks of how he leads and consults today.

"The more things change, the more you need to rely on the things that never change. Trust. Honesty. Relationships. God is the biggest one."

When Loss Becomes a Commission

The pivot in Abel's story came through grief. Earlier this year, his aunt passed away. Searching for people to thank for pouring into his career, he discovered that several of his most influential mentors had also died — quietly, without him ever getting the chance to express his gratitude. Then his youth pastor passed. The man who had stepped into Abel's life during his parents' divorce, who had walked alongside him and his siblings for years, was gone.

"I felt a little cheated," Abel says. "I wanted to thank them for what they had invested in me. And then I realized — I need to do something. There are so many people who poured so much into me. It is my time now to give back."

He wrote a book capturing the operational and leadership lessons from his corporate career (Sticky Change) — structured so that anyone could benefit from the knowledge, whether or not they ever hired him. A missionary read it and asked if he could translate the concepts for the mission field, stripping away the corporate jargon and making the frameworks accessible to people working in churches and remote communities around the world.

Abel did more than revise a manuscript. He built a free AI-powered application that helps missionaries prioritize initiatives, create field plans, and access downloadable templates — all without a single piece of business jargon. It is completely free. People are using it. And the feedback is growing.

He is also now working behind the scenes with Clarity, an organization that supports women facing unplanned pregnancies, helping them streamline operations, reduce paperwork, and more effectively engage fathers in the process. No income. Just expertise, donated entirely.

"I no longer look at these initiatives as money-making opportunities," he says. "I look at the number of people they're going to impact and the lives that could be saved. One life saved is important."

He has also been invited to attend the ICCM conference — a gathering of technical leaders focused on technology implementation for missions and religious organizations — with a view toward expanding ICCM's reach into Latin America by 2027.

The Invitation

For Abel, all of this — the failures, the pivots, the losses, the new direction — points toward a single conviction: your story, however imperfect, is exactly what someone else needs to hear.

"Your story doesn't have to be perfect. In fact, the struggles and mistakes, the lessons and the moments when God redirected you — those may be the most valuable parts. Someone else may need to hear exactly what God has taught you."

He is not speaking abstractly. He is speaking from a frozen Amazon account, from mentors he never got to thank, from a startup that wounded him and a calling he tried to reroute through legal separation and creative bookkeeping. He is speaking as a man who was trained — hard — and came out the other side more useful to God's purposes than he ever could have been otherwise.

If you are a Christian business leader sitting on a story you think is too messy to share, Abel Jimenez would like a word with you. The body of Christ does not need polished testimonies. It needs honest ones — the kind that give someone else permission to confess, to change course, and to follow where the calling actually leads.

That is what it means to be part of the Kingdom Factor Collective. Come as you are. Bring what God has taught you. The commission is too important to wait until your story looks the way you think it should.