Except that God build the house . . .

• Except that God build the house, they labor in vain that build it;
  Except that God guard the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.

This is one of my favorite texts (Ps. 127:1). It's a difficult passage, and famous; I worry that it may be famous for the wrong reason. At a first reading, it seems to be giving us bad advice, which Jewish scholars have always rejected: the notion that we ought to sit back and wait for God to do our work for us. I don't think that's the intention of this text at all, but let's struggle with this issue for a moment.

A common expression among those who must take a leap of faith is that "God will provide." But how do we know? What if God doesn't provide? I submit, as a businessperson, that if you've never been in a situation where you've failed (you might say, where God hasn't provided) you haven't been trying hard enough, and it might be wise to seek out new challenges. Failure is an indication that we are pushing the envelope, learning and growing; when combined with the disciplined study of our circumstances and the self-awareness to know what we need to learn, failure leads to success. Success is seldom provided on a silver platter for us, and when it is, we haven't really earned it, and because we haven't earned it, we may very well not know enough to make the best use of it. Right? I think most of us in business have had plenty of failure and success experiences and have found this to be true.

Business is about risk, and the notion of God providing is about certainty. That's why the sit-back-and-wait analysis of the psalm doesn't resonate with me. To boot, it makes little experiential or theological sense. Businesspeople know perfectly well that we live in a world in which evil is often rewarded by material gain, while good sometimes necessitates suffering. Therefore -- to summarize in a nutshell what philosophers call "the problem of evil" -- the notion of an interventionist God who does our work for us is problematic. This doesn't really bother the spiritual entrepreneur, I think, because we know perfectly well that survival and success in business require us to make the best of the opportunities provided to us, often engaging our creativity to wring success out of what seems to be setback or failure. We don't obsess about God coming in to save us; we know we're responsible for our own survival and success.

But we may, depending on our own moral character, be certain of some things. In business, we know better than to be certain about outcomes. Ancient Jews who ran small farms, at the mercy of the weather, knew the same thing intuitively, but that didn't stop them from blessing God who provides "every day, every season, every time" (Grace after Meals). So what is this certainty, if it's not certainty about outcomes?

I think the spiritual entrepreneur has certainty, at least, about purpose. Upon a rock-solid understanding of why we're doing what we do, we have a reasonable hope of founding a solid and resilient business. But if we don't know why we're here, we will drift and fail. We also have certainty about the means we use to achieve our ends. We are ethical and we do not cheat; we value honest work for honest pay; we keep our word once given. Those simple values of hard work, honesty, diligence and discipline (combined with luck, of course) have turned paupers into billionaires. In religious terms, we let God into our work when we behave in these ethical and honorable ways.