So many of our African-American brothers and sisters have fallen prey to that old, old enemy mistakenly called “success.”  They have fought hard to climb the ladder of success.  They have sacrificed hours away from their homes.  They have “gone without.” They have missed important “family days,” and they have worked as hard as they could to get to the top of that ladder.

The only problem is that they have gotten to the top of the ladder and found out that the ladder was propped up against the wrong wall!  They have lost their families.  They have lost a sense of who they are.  They have lost themselves and they have lost all connection with God in the process!  Many of our “Generation X” corporate executives have given up on the church.  They have left the church.  They have stopped worshipping God publicly.  They no longer see a need to be a part of a body of believers and they have cut themselves off from the very well springs that make life meaningful for African Americans.

Across three decades of being a pastor, I have seen case after case of young “corporate types” who have lost their moorings.  They have lost their center.  They no longer find any meaning in what it is they are doing, and they just do what they do to “get by,” get over, or “make it to the top.”  In the process, they also lose their souls. Every time I am confronted with trying to help somebody find {his or her} way “back home,” I am reminded of what Jesus said.  Jesus asked the question: “What would it profit a person to gain the whole world and lose their own soul?”

So many of us are “gaining the world.”  We are qualified in areas our grandparents never dreamed of.  We pull down six figure salaries.  We sit in corporate boardrooms on “mostly white” boards.  We play golf with the “movers and shakers” of the business world and of the political world.  At the end of the day, however, we are left empty. We are left with a void. We are left “rootless.”  We are left as wanderers and vagabonds in a world that does not want us and a world in which we cannot feel “at home.”

I write as a representative of one faith tradition among many.  I write to encourage and to inspire.  I write to “point the way” for somebody who feels that sense of being lost, and I write to offer some pointers as to how to navigate and negotiate being a part of “Caesar’s household.” Our grandparents and great-grandparents saw what many of us cannot see.  They saw the emptiness, the hollowness and the viciousness of being a part of a “system” that dehumanizes people.  Many of us forget that the “corporate world” is the same world that exploits third world people today just as slavery exploited African Americans 200 years ago!

The name of the game has changed, but the game is still the same!  People in the new game are still seen as “things.”  As African Americans were defined as property in the founding documents of this country, in today’s corporate world, third world people are no better off than African Americans were in 1787!  They are commodities to be exploited: “Things.”

Sweatshops have replaced plantations.  Child prostitution and child pornography have replaced the sodomy committed upon young Africans held in slavery.  The bottom line remains the same, however; and the bottom line is “profit!” How do you work in that world and maintain your faith?  A lot of us do not even like the word “faith” anymore.  We prefer the more chic-sounding word, “spirituality!”  We are caught up in an Oprah-generated mentality and a 12-step vocabulary that prevent us from using the very words and the very bridge that “brought us over!”

Our grandparents and great-grandparents did not know anything about “higher powers.”  They did not know anything about a so-called “spirituality.”  Nor did they care anything at all about 12-steps!  They knew the Lord.  They had a personal relationship with the Lord; and they encouraged us to develop a personal relationship with the Lord. We opted for something else, however.  We chose not to listen to them.  We went our own way and now look at us!  We do not know who we are.  We do not know where we are.  We choose mates from other races (over our own women and men) and then we try to justify it intellectually and articulately—sounding crazier to our children than we do to our parents!

A daily devotion period is the first step we need to cultivate in terms of regaining our sense of wholeness.  We cannot be whole persons if we are separated and alienated (or estranged) from God!  The Zulu saying captures this truth most poignantly.  The Zulus say, “Umntu, Gumntu, Gbantu!”  When they say that, what they are saying is that a person cannot be a person without being in relationship with other persons. Most importantly, however, the last three letters of each of those words in Zulu are “Ntu.”  Ntu is the Zulu word for God!  What they are saying then is that a person cannot be a person without having God in his or her life!  That simple yet profound African truth has been lost in the wake of the Transatlantic Slave Trade!  We seem to think that we can make it without God!  We have found out that we cannot, yet we are too embarrassed to say that and “come on back home!”

The Africans who were enslaved understood that you cannot make it through any day without God.  We need to go back to that understanding in order to move forward.  That is what the principal of Sankofa means.  We need to go back and reclaim that which is ours before we have any hope or prayer of going forward into this 21^st century! Once we establish a daily devotional (or time with God), we have taken the first step. Once we establish a time for getting close to God, talking to God or “making space for God” in our busy corporate lives, then we have taken the most important step in terms of negotiating our way through these shark infested waters called the corporate world.

Our personal relationship with God enhances our ability to see all of God’s children as our brothers and sisters.  Once that has been established, we are then at the second step of making it safely through the jungle called the corporate world.  When we can begin to see people as people (and not property), then our actions and our decisions will change.  When we can see Black people, white people, brown people, yellow people and red people as God’s children (and not as commodities, objects, things or “widgets”), things will change.

When we start from the premise that all of us are God’s children, then we can begin to make decisions in our corporate positions that are much more humanely focused and in keeping with what God would want done for God’s children.  This is not anything profound.  This is not anything new.  Many of us are parents.  We would not want any one of our children hurt!  If we can carry that same kind of philosophy into our corporate dealings, then we can hope for a much more wholesome understanding of what it means to be a corporate executive and a Christian than what it is we see all over the business world “landscape” right now!

The Christian community is offering this perspective through the popular “WWJD” slogan.  They are asking: “What Would Jesus Do?”   To raise that kind of question, and to translate it into whatever our faith claim happens to be, will produce very different approaches than what we are currently seeing in the corporate world community.

Jesus said “Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these my little ones, you have done it unto me!”  Listening to those words and taking them seriously would make a difference in the way we “do business.” Taking Jesus’ words seriously when we make decisions (about drugs, about markets, about purchasing, about Sub-Saharan debt relief, about the World Bank, about the IMF, and the list goes on) would radically alter the way in which we approach issues that we have to face as Christians (or other persons of faith) in the corporate world. Our first step, however, is cultivating our own personal relationship with God.  Start there, and then let’s move to the second step, which is cultivating relationships with God’s children of all colors, races, ethnic backgrounds and needs.

Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. is the senior pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, IL.