— and why it still feels worth pursuing
A Word That Wouldn’t Let Go
In 2009, during a period of serious illness — fear, pain, and moments I can only describe as hallucinatory — a word began to matter to me in a new way: flourishing.
I heard what I believe was God speaking to me. I know how that sounds. I know it risks making me look foolish. Still, the experience marked me, and the question it raised has never let me go.
Not can humans flourish. But what does God actually intend for human life — and why, when we have the wealth and the means, do we so consistently choose less than what’s possible?
For much of my life I assumed answers had to rely on constraint — there was only so much. Fiscal conservatism — spend carefully, limit wisely — felt like prudence. Especially coming from a good Republican family.
But something shifted. When I looked honestly at the scale of human suffering and inequality alongside the scale of American wealth, the question stopped feeling like economics. It became something else entirely.
Why do we skimp?
Not can we do more. But why, when we clearly could, do we choose not to? What does that say about what we actually believe human beings are worth?
The Question That Opened Everything
In 2020, a Christian school in inner-city Minneapolis asked me to help implement a technology and business program alongside their classical education curriculum. The concern was simple — students might be left behind without both.
My role was oversight, but I asked if I could teach. “What will you teach?” they asked.
“About technology,” I said. “The bigger questions — what it is, why it exists, how it came to be, and whether it’s actually good or bad.”
They weren’t sure the kids would go for it. Neither was I.
I started from scratch — a semester-long course for ninth and tenth graders. Nobody wanted to hear me drone on about stone tools, the wheel, and the arc of innovation from the ancient world to the hyperbolic explosion of the last hundred years. You probably felt that just reading the sentence.
But two questions caught. Why do humans create technology at all? And when we do — is it actually good?
That second question kept pulling me somewhere deeper. Into what I actually believe about humans, about God, and about what we’re here for. I’ve always believed that God intends for humans to flourish. That conviction has shaped my life. But I’d never tried to make it rigorous — to ask what flourishing actually means, and how you’d know it when you saw it.
So I started researching.
Always Drawn to Large Things
The research pulled me toward something bigger than technology. I’ve always been drawn to large-scale questions. From early in life I believed that politics, government, policy, business, and technology could combine to shape conditions that genuinely do good for human beings. I’ve never been satisfied with only personal improvement or small, isolated wins.
Systems shape lives. If you care about people, eventually you have to care about systems.
When I talk this way, people respond with concern or skepticism. Who are you to think about things that big? That’s too hard. Focus on what’s right in front of you.
I was once told directly: “Why don’t you worry about things that will matter once you’re dead?”
That got me thinking.
Then someone inevitably brings up the Serenity Prayer.
The Serenity Prayer Problem
The prayer asks for serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. The problem is not the prayer. The problem is how easily we decide — without much examination — that large-scale human suffering belongs in the “cannot change” category.
At what point did resignation start passing for wisdom?
I’ve tried to take this advice fully, and I can’t. Part of it may be stubbornness. But part of it is experience. I have lived inside efforts where large-scale change was not only imagined but implemented and partially achieved. The evidence remains: coordinated human effort can move the world in meaningful ways.
Systems That Have Changed Things
Before this era, the world had already learned — painfully — that systems matter.
After World War I, many of the victorious nations chose punishment over restoration. Germany was hit with crushing reparations under the Treaty of Versailles. Nations turned inward, focused on protecting what they had and competing aggressively against rivals for markets, resources, and power. Economic nationalism intensified. Cooperation weakened. Democracies became unstable. Wealth and power concentrated unevenly across societies.
The causes of the Great Depression and World War II were far more complex than any single economic system alone. But the combination of punitive peace terms, fragile financial systems, extreme inequality, nationalism, and international distrust helped create conditions that spiraled into catastrophe.
By 1945, much of the world lay devastated. Tens of millions were dead. Economies were shattered. Cities were rubble. Something fundamentally different was needed.
So nations — led largely by the United States and its allies — attempted a different approach. Instead of retreating into isolation and rivalry, they began to collaborate, constructing systems intended to foster cooperation, stability, and shared prosperity. The goals were ambitious, but clear:
• Prevent another world war.
• Prevent another global economic collapse.
To do this, they built a multilayered framework of institutions, agreements, investments, and alliances. The Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe. Bretton Woods institutions stabilized finance and trade. NATO and other alliances sought to reduce the likelihood of major war. Public investment expanded infrastructure, education, and research. Labor protections strengthened across many nations. Trade systems increasingly aimed — at least in part — toward broader prosperity rather than purely extractive competition.
The result, over the next forty years, was extraordinary: the largest sustained reduction in poverty, expansion of the middle class, increase in life expectancy, and growth in human well-being the world had yet seen.
It was not accidental. It was not inevitable.
It was the result of people, institutions, incentives, capital, labor, and shared vision aligned — however imperfectly, and many relying on their faith traditions to guide them — toward human flourishing.
My Personal Experience
I’ve lived inside one small version of that same attempt.
In 2000, I became part of an effort called Transora. It was an industry-wide initiative to reinvent the global consumer goods supply chain using the then-nascent and wildly hyped internet. The consumer goods industry feared being left behind by digital transformation. So, backed by more than 100 of the world’s largest companies and fueled by roughly $250 million in investment, Transora sought to standardize data, automate processes, and enable collaboration across one of the largest economic supply systems ever built — representing more than $15 trillion in annual activity.
Had it fully succeeded, it might have opened global supply networks more effectively to underserved communities, lowered costs for those with the fewest resources, and dramatically reduced waste across the system. The platform itself ultimately fell short of its largest ambitions. But its vision — and much of the data architecture and process design behind it — helped lay foundations for many of today’s modern supply-chain standards and operations.
And yet, 20 years later, the pandemic revealed how much fragility remained. The supply-chain disruptions exposed hidden dependencies and vulnerability to disruption. Efficiency alone is not enough. Globalized production creates immense complexity — and when it breaks, those with the fewest resources suffer most.
Still, enough was accomplished to prove something important:
Large systems can be redesigned. Human coordination at scale is possible.
And when institutions, incentives, resources, and imagination align, the world can change.
But many people — especially those left outside systems economically, socially, educationally, or politically — understandably look at these arrangements and see failure, exclusion, hypocrisy, or concentrated power protecting itself. And when systems fail to deliver fairness or flourishing broadly enough, distrust grows.
Sometimes the response even becomes not “fix what is broken,” but “burn it down if it’s not perfect.”
Yet history suggests something more hopeful and more difficult at the same time: large-scale flourishing is possible, even if never perfect. And faith suggests we are not relieved of responsibility simply because perfection remains out of reach.
We are called to keep building anyway.
Why I Can’t Let This Go
When people suggest I give this up — focus only on what’s directly in my control, or on what will matter after I’m gone — I can’t fully agree.
If God works in the world, doesn’t God often do so through people? Through minds, tools, cooperation, and courage? “Be fruitful” was not a command to retreat into private goodness. It was a charge to participate in sustaining life.
I believe that part of what we are called to do is ask whether the frameworks we live inside help life flourish or quietly diminish it. This journey exists because that question still feels worth asking — carefully, honestly, and at scale.
More to come.
I don’t offer this because I’ve got it right. I offer it because I’m on the road — an odyssey, perhaps, like many of you are.
What started as personal pondering became a hobby, and the hobby has become something more — research, a beginning body of work, a framework, and an ongoing journey.
The question led me somewhere. Here is where it led.
→ GOD’S INTENT FOR HUMANITY →
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