A Voice on a Morning Run

It started the way a lot of God-given assignments do — quietly, unexpectedly, in the middle of an ordinary moment. Chad Harbour was out for a run when a thought broke through the rhythm of his stride: You already have the questions. Now make them available to everyone.

That nudge would eventually become SpiritualLifeStories.com, a cloud-based platform designed to help everyday Christians do the one thing many of them quietly dread — articulate, document, and pass on their faith.

But to understand why that moment mattered so much, you have to understand the road that led Chad there.

A Life Built Across Continents and Boardrooms

Chad Harbour grew up in Tokyo, Japan, where his father ran Asia Pacific operations for DuPont. Those childhood years shaped him deeply. He still returns to Tokyo every two years, still calls it the greatest city in the world, and still carries the global perspective that comes from growing up between cultures.

After finishing high school in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Chad entered corporate America and spent two decades climbing the ladder in the telecom industry, eventually rising to Vice President of Marketing for Asia Pacific at Nortel. From there, he was recruited by a private equity firm to run a portfolio company. They exceeded every target. He retired at 50.

Then his wife asked the question every high-achiever eventually faces: Now what?

“You are 50 years old,” she told him. “You do not golf. What are you going to do? You cannot work out five hours a day.”

Chad’s answer was simple: “Maybe God will show me the way.”

He did not have to wait long.

Three Church Ladies and a $100,000 Memoir

A woman Chad’s family knew from Wilmington, Delaware, called with an unusual request: she wanted him to write her memoir. He hesitated. He was a journaler, not a biographer. He had helped friends write short stories, but never anything like this.

She called back a month later and settled the debate: she would pay him $100,000 to do it.

“Why not? Maybe God is saying I can do this,” Chad remembered thinking.

He took the assignment, traveled back to the area where he had gone to high school, and discovered something unexpected — he was genuinely good at it, and he loved it.

Word spread through her church. Two more women asked him to write their stories, at far more modest fees. But the spark had been lit. He went home, built a business case, analyzed the marketplace, and found that it was largely wide open. Legacy ghostwriting became his second career.

Over the following years, Chad’s client list grew to include some of the most prominent names in American business — among them the former chairman and president of JP Morgan, widely considered the most influential banker in the world at the time, and Archie Dunham, former chairman and CEO of Conoco. Chad has also written company histories for well-known brands like Johnsonville.

His firm now employs a full team of writers, editors, proofreaders, graphic artists, printers, and genealogists, and has completed more than 230 private memoirs and company history books for clients.

The Question That Changed Everything

For his Christian clients, Chad had long included a chapter in his interview template simply called “My Faith.” The questions were straightforward but profound:

How did you come to love Jesus?
What were your struggles with God?
What are your favorite Bible verses?
What does your faith mean to you?

Those chapters consistently produced some of the most powerful writing in each book.

And it was while sitting with that reality — on a morning run — that the idea surfaced.

“Ninety-seven percent of Christians do not feel comfortable talking about their faith. They do not feel comfortable giving their testimony. So what if we could make it easy for people to do this?”

The answer was SpiritualLifeStories.com.

For $99, subscribers receive a two-year membership to a cloud-based platform built around approximately 400 guided questions organized into chapters — parents, grandparents, childhood, teenage years, marriage, children, career, faith milestones, favorite Scripture, giving back, hobbies, and more.

Users answer at their own pace, in their own voice. They can type their responses or use voice-to-text and AI-assisted tools. When they are ready, they press a button and receive a printed, hardbound book — no trip to a printer required, no technical expertise needed.

The vision behind it is straightforward and deeply personal.

“Maybe there is a nephew out there who is on drugs and has not found Christ,” Chad explained. “You can say, ‘This is what I believe. This is the most important thing in my life, and I hope this can help you.’”

“We as Christians are called to tell others about Christ. It is the Great Commission — the most important thing we can do. How are you going to do that if you do not feel comfortable giving your verbal testimony?”

Faith That Walks the Walk

Chad came to faith at 17 during a revival in Philadelphia, even after years of faithful church attendance as an Episcopalian altar boy at St. Alban’s in Tokyo. That moment of personally accepting Christ as Lord and Savior anchored everything that followed.

He has attended Bible studies consistently throughout his adult life, including Roaring Lambs in Dallas, and has raised his children through Trinity Christian School, a place he credits not for athletic trophies, but for grounding his kids in Scripture and character.

He is candid about where he feels comfortable — and where he does not. He does not claim to be the kind of person who naturally strikes up faith conversations with strangers. But he leads by example in other ways: tithing consistently at 10% and above, directing the majority of his giving to Christian philanthropies, and nominating clients like Archie Dunham — who famously hosted faith-sharing events the night before every major shareholder meeting — for recognition through organizations like Roaring Lambs.

“If you are going to talk the talk, you need to walk the walk,” Chad said plainly. “You have to find a way to do that.”

For him, Spiritual Life Stories is that way.

His memoir business funds it. His son has joined the company. His daughter, finishing her MBA at Dartmouth, may follow. The long-term goal is to hand off the daily business operations to his children and pour the bulk of his energy into expanding the platform — getting more Christians writing, more stories preserved, and more faith passed on to the next generation.

The Legacy You Leave Behind

There is something quietly radical about what Chad Harbour is building.

In a culture that often reduces legacy to financial inheritance, he is making the case that the most valuable thing a believer can leave behind is the story of how God moved in their life — written down, printed, and placed in the hands of someone who needs to read it.

The Bible itself was written that way, he points out — men and women moved by the Holy Spirit to record what they had witnessed and believed. Spiritual Life Stories is built on the conviction that the same Spirit is ready to move through ordinary Christians willing to sit down and tell the truth about their faith journey.

“When you write about your parents and their faith, your grandparents and their faith, where they went to church, what their favorite Bible verses were — you are being inspired by the Holy Spirit and telling your story.”

If you have been meaning to write down your faith story — your testimony, your turning points, the verses that carried you through — consider this your prompt. The platform is ready. The questions are waiting. And somewhere in your family, there is almost certainly someone who needs to read what you have to say.

Visit SpiritualLifeStories.com to explore the platform and begin writing your story today.