God's Startups

Some very popular products got their starts in very inauspicious ways. And we're not talking about the garage startups that produced twentysomething billionaires. In this psalm, we identify three divine startups that have blessed our lives.

"Great are the works of the Lord," says the writer of Psalm 111, "studied by all who delight in them" (v. 2).

Great are the works of Brownie Wise, Art Fry and Lonnie Johnson, studied by all who love stories of successful startups. These folks put energy and creativity into small projects that became really, really big.

Brownie Wise, for example, was a secretary at an aviation company in 1947. She began to sell brooms at parties in private homes to make a little extra cash. Soon she began to offer a product called Tupperware, and her "party plan" sales technique took off. Today, party businesses are thriving, offering everything from jewelry to candles to animated Bible stories.

In 1974, Art Fry was working as a project developer at 3M. He wanted a better bookmark for his church hymnal, so he and Spencer Silver, a colleague, invented Post-it Notes. The 3M company now sells 50 billion of them annually.

Lonnie Johnson was working as a nuclear engineer in 1982, and he invented an...