John Lupher (Part 2)
John shares insights on creating successful partnerships, giving, overcoming limitations, working with bureaucracies.
By Marjorie F. Eddington
Categories: Business, Engineering, Jesus' Commandment - To Love as He Loved, Putting God First John Lupher, a technology entrepreneur, is CEO/CTO of Evermore Systems, which provides turnkey engineering product design. And some of his customers have asked him to start businesses with them to take their products to market. So John has had a lot of experience working with partners and overcoming limitations, which applies both to business and to personal life.
 What have you learned from working with partners as an entrepreneur?
If your partners don’t perform, it can be devastating; if they do perform, they’re tremendously helpful. It’s easy to get caught up in the drama of partners. Having a business partner is like a marriage in many ways. It’s a relationship in which you have to realize that you’re going to be giving more than receiving. Everybody always thinks they’re giving more than the other person. But thinking that you’re self-justified in a relationship because you’re giving more actually erodes a relationship. So I tell those I work with to expect to be the ones who give more. As a result, the question of fairness, and all the problems that go along with that, largely go away.
So how are you able to give more and not feel like you’re giving yourself away?
The well-spring of Love is infinitely deep and cannot run out. You’re actually giving of God’s infinite love. It’s not anything that you’re personally doing. So you have an unlimited amount of love, forgiveness, principle, and intelligence to bring to a relationship. When you understand your spiritual nature, you realize that you have everything you need every moment, so you don’t get hung up on how much more you are giving.
On the other side, if you feel that you’re giving from a point of limitation—you have a limited amount a love to give—then you feel you can run out of love, or fear that you’ll give away your love. You get into the habit of measuring how much love you’ve given, rather than being in the habit of loving. Limitation would say that the good’s here but not over there. But you can’t be conditional in your application of love. If you can see that good is on both sides, then the limitations leave.
How do limitations leave?
The Infinite is the only thing really in play. Human stuff simply can’t limit God’s love. Infinite Love, which is truly unconditional, has mastery over every human situation. Now, from a human perspective, we might not always be aware of this, nor perceive our infinite selves. But we can still place our confidence in Love to manifest itself in a tangible way that we can understand. We can expect that God will reveal to us what we need to know—whether it means being more generous, more loving, or being clearer about what’s right or true or correct, or what needs correcting in a particular relationship.
And we can feel the Christ spirit with us, helping us to grow to a sense of mastery. As we pursue Truth and enlightenment, we get to a place where we can have a clear dialogue with God, where we can have a realization, or revelation, of what God is and who we are. As images of the infinite God, we can indeed express mastery over human situations and limitations.
What are some of the challenges you’ve faced, and how have you worked through them?
One of the many challenges is dealing with bureaucracies. Working with a bureaucracy seems so beyond the normal problem-resolution techniques. There are so many people involved, and things can just run amok. You fill out paperwork and find out that the person who was promoting your technology was transferred. Then you redo the paperwork, but you’re not sure who’s in control, etc. So you can’t use a normal human business process with bureaucracy because it’s so big.
This forces you to see the larger stage, to see that God runs the whole show and plays the whole picture. I trust in God, knowing that there can’t be a need without there being the fulfillment of that need—“on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt 6:10). I’m convinced that a sense of limitation can’t impede the progress of a right activity guided by the Infinite. And since our motives are right and good, I trust that following the highest sense of right will always yield a positive result.
So when we have a product that can meet a need in facing a problem, and then someone says no for one reason or the other, we don’t necessarily see that as an end. Rather, we’ve used “NO” as a springboard to find a different or a better solution that will satisfy those who are saying no. And the solutions we’ve come up with are pretty exciting.
It comes from being able to step back, be aware of my own thought, and make sure I’m not limiting my love or being conditional in my application of love. In the big picture, the smallest and the biggest activity in the human sense don’t make that much of a difference. God ensures right activity and blessing.
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