I like to think that my business is a bit different than most. I left the big corporate world to work in a small IT consulting company 12 years ago. For the last 6 years, I’ve run a privately held software development and web design company with 16 employees. The most exciting part of my job is that I know we are counter-cultural, yet we succeed where others have failed. There are no slick marketing campaigns, no fancy hype, no telemarketing calls, no spam email, no suits and ties, and no mistreatment of workers. We are able to do this because we made the conscious decision to reject the worldview of corporate America that views its customers and employees as consumable resources. Instead, we flipped the model upside down and we view our company as a sustainable resource used by its clients and employees to build better lives. We don’t view any business deal as a success unless it also makes our clients successful. We have frequently hired people cast off from the corporate world and we give them the tools to succeed. Our employees are well supported, blessed with company wide profit sharing, flexible work schedules, quality health care coverage and the best working environment I’ve ever seen. The strange thing is that in the end, of any company I’ve worked for, this is the most profitable.

Running an ethical business is just one small step. We can't stop there and assume we've succeeded in modeling Jesus' vision. The empires of commercialism, military domination, and religious ideology each want us to apply self-imposed limits on our options and reach. The empire wants us to assume there is no hope of banding together to make large scale changes that would throttle its powerful control. The ability to squash hope and limit vision is possibly the most powerful tool of any empire. Walter Brueggeman calls this "royal numbness and denial". To speak prophetically means to cut through this numbness and denial with words that will cause us to imagine something different. The power of the Bible is that it can expand our vision and restore our hope by giving us another way of seeing the world. But, that can only happen if we will allow the Bible's subversive voices to cut through the many superficial layers of numbness added during 2000 years of domestication. We will also need to look beyond our own lives and recognize the irony of joining a revolution when our own religion has been used by many to support the same ideals we are called to resist.

"Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore, we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, could be accomplished alone; therefore, we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our own standpoint; therefore, we must be saved by the final form of love, which is forgiveness." - Reinhold Niebuhr "The Irony of American History" 1952