From the Cardboard Box to the Corner Office: Todd Wagner on Grace, Forgiveness, and Leading Like a Shepherd

Todd Wagner entered the world in a cardboard box lined with a blanket — delivered by a hospital to his new parents on the day of his adoption. It's the kind of detail that could define a person in all the wrong ways. Instead, for Todd, it became the first chapter of a story about grace he never stopped recognizing.

"I've been blessed way more than I deserve in my life," says Todd, now Director of Sales and Leasing at Media Quest Outdoor in the Cedar Rapids, Iowa area. And he means it with the full weight of someone who has seen both sides of that statement.

A Foundation Built on More Than Music

Todd was the fourteenth child — the third adopted — in a deeply Catholic, deeply musical family in Quincy, Illinois. His father led the music department at Quincy College, and the Wagner household doubled as a rehearsal hall. The family recorded two albums, performed at churches across the region, and sang at the Salvation Army's Christmas Mass each year. They even lived in the Moncton Mansion, a historic home with a colorful Prohibition-era past that had been sold to the family at a generously reduced price by a widow who simply believed they deserved it.

When a pastor fresh out of Moody Bible Institute moved to town and the Wagners offered their home as a gathering place, the family transitioned from Catholic Mass to a non-denominational, Bible-teaching church — without ever fully leaving the other behind. It was a faith that was lived, sung, and embedded in the rhythms of daily life.

But embedded doesn't always mean owned. For Todd, the faith of his childhood would eventually have to become a faith of his own choosing — and that journey was anything but smooth.

The Questioning Years

As a mixed-heritage young man adopted into a white family, Todd carried questions about identity that went deeper than most of his peers could see. Add to that the transition out of his parents' home and into the fast-moving world of car sales, and the faith he had been handed at age eleven began to loosen its grip.

"I wasn't a non-believer," he says, "but I was a questioning believer. There was a little bit of guilt there — I felt bad for questioning it."

Those questions led him down some difficult roads. Late nights after work. Choices that compounded. A move to Wilmington, North Carolina, where he thought he was finding himself — but was actually losing ground. It took his brother, a man who had been to prison and back, to fly out and deliver the message straight: you are headed the wrong way, and I'm bringing you home.

"I know God sent him because I couldn't hear that conversation from somebody I thought was overly righteous. I had to hear it from somebody who had been through a lot of things."

That's a truth worth sitting with. Sometimes God doesn't send the polished messenger. He sends the one we'll actually listen to.

Grace Received, Grace Extended

Todd came home, met his wife, started a family, and began attending Crossing Church in Quincy. A small group became the turning point — not because it had all the answers, but because it gave him room to ask the questions without shame. A trusted friend who served as youth pastor helped him understand something that freed him: God expects us to have questions. Faith isn't the absence of doubt; it's the willingness to keep walking anyway.

That realization unlocked something in Todd's understanding of leadership too. The corporate culture he had absorbed in the car business taught him to keep people at arm's length — to treat employees as interchangeable parts, to assume everyone was one bad week away from quitting, and to manage with pressure rather than investment. It was a cowboy mentality: shock, prod, redirect.

But as his faith deepened, a different model began to take shape.

"The difference between a shepherd and a cowboy — a cowboy pokes and prods with electrodes. A shepherd leads his sheep. As I look back at the life of Jesus, he was definitely leading the flock."

The shepherd doesn't drive from behind. The shepherd goes first. And that reorientation — from manager to shepherd — became the defining shift in how Todd approached the people entrusted to his care.

Forgiveness as a Leadership Discipline

One of the most honest moments in Todd's story comes when he names forgiveness not as a virtue he naturally possessed, but as something he had to work at — hard.

"Forgiveness was something that came tough for me in the years of being in the car business," he admits. "It's pretty cutthroat. Sometimes you're like, that wasn't an accident. You did that on purpose."

The prayer he kept coming back to was the one most of us know by heart but rarely let land: forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those. That reciprocal structure — the way our capacity to receive grace is tied to our willingness to extend it — became a daily leadership practice, not just a Sunday morning recitation.

He also learned that showing grace to others required showing it to himself first. Making mistakes. Letting people down. Getting things wrong. None of those disqualify a leader. They humanize one.

"I've been shown a ton of grace," he says, "and I should be showing people grace as well."

Influencing Culture Without Losing Your Convictions

Todd is candid about the tension that comes with living out faith inside a corporate environment. At his previous employer, navigating company-wide messaging that conflicted with his beliefs required discernment — knowing when to speak, when to hold the line quietly, and when to let his conduct do the talking.

One moment stands out: a manager on his team pushed back when he offered to pray for her family member in the hospital. "You Christians are always praying for us," she said. His response was simple and disarming — it's not going to hurt you for me to do that. In fact, it's a good thing.

No argument. No sermon. Just quiet confidence in what he believed, offered without coercion.

That posture — present but not pushy, principled but not preachy — is the narrow road that faith-driven leaders have to walk every day in the marketplace. Todd doesn't pretend it's easy. But he has found that seeing every person as someone with inherent value, made in God's image, shapes everything: how you coach, how you correct, and how you let someone go when it finally comes to that.

"Everybody has value," he says simply. And he means it not as a corporate talking point, but as a theological conviction.

What God Is Still Building

Todd is refreshingly honest about where he is still growing. A recent health scare landed him in the emergency room, reminding him that the body has limits and that surrender — even of his physical future — is part of trusting God. He and his family are also working through what he calls the clutter problem: the accumulation of things that don't actually produce the life they want.

"The riches in heaven are going to greatly outweigh the riches here," he says. "All of these little things — you can't take them with you. Nor would I want to."

And then there is the ongoing battle with ego — perhaps the most universal struggle for any leader who takes their faith seriously. His advice to other business leaders who want to integrate their faith more fully into their work is straightforward:

"Let the ego go. Trust your people — just like you have to trust that God's got this, and that His will is better than anything I can imagine. Not praying about the situations you face at work is leaving answers on the table."

The job change that brought him to Media Quest Outdoor came with a bruising to his professional pride. But Todd sees it clearly now: he needed it. The smaller company, the owner reachable by a single phone call, the team that feels more like a community — it fits a man who has spent years learning to lead like a shepherd.

The Invitation

Todd Wagner's story is not a polished testimony about a man who had it all figured out. It is the story of someone who was delivered into the world with very little — and who has spent a lifetime learning to recognize, receive, and redistribute the grace that kept finding him anyway.

For leaders in the marketplace today: where are you leading like a cowboy when you could lead like a shepherd? Where is ego blocking the trust your team needs from you? And where has grace already found you — grace you haven't yet passed on?

Those questions are worth more than any management framework. And the answers, as Todd would tell you, are usually already written down somewhere.