CINCINNATI, Ohio, July 16, 2012 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A huge national food manufacturing company in the U.S. does more than just deliver great-tasting prepackaged meals – it delivers them with a pro-life flair.
JTM Food Group, which boasted $100 million in sales just last year, delivers their meals to schools, restaurants, the military, and government organizations using 20 semitrailers, each displaying a prodigious image of a beautiful smiling baby on the rear panel with the words “Life, what a beautiful choice.” The bottom reads: “JTM: A Right to Life Company.”
“It’s our opportunity to witness,” said Tony Maas, CEO of the business, which has been family owned and operated for three generations, to LifeSiteNews in an interview. Maas owns and runs JTM along with his three brothers who all share the same pro-life convictions.
“Being confrontational is certainly not what we are seeking, but only to speak the truth with love,” he said.
Maas said that his pro-life convictions were passed on to him from his “extremely Catholic” parents and grandparents who believed that with the passage of Roe v. Wade, there would be a need for “much prayer, not just for the babies, but for the mothers who were going to have abortions and for the grief that they would be experiencing.”
“Being pro-life has been part of our family, and certainly our business”, said Maas who is married and the father of five children. “We feel that we should use every avenue we have to bring the message of life to the world.”
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Maas explained that a culture of life is founded upon the principles that “God has made us”, that a man and a woman come together to form a “forever relationship in the sacrament of marriage” through which children are born, and that “strong families” are the building blocks of a flourishing society.
“Unfortunately our culture has countered these principles with the destruction of human life through abortion,” he said.
“A culture of life is about being obedient to God and his plan whereas a culture of death is about being disobedient to God and his plan.”
Maas would not have it any other way than to intimately weave the values he embraces in his personal life with the way he runs his professional life. He called it an “impossible way to live” when one tries to separate personal beliefs from professional life.
“Your life has got to be an open book” he says, where things are not fragmented or “departmentalized”.
“We’re working for an eternal purpose in all that we do. To say that God can be with me on Sundays or in my own quiet time [of prayer] but can’t be with me at work is just counter to the entire [Christian] belief system.”
Maas says that JTM has never encountered a complaint about the unapologetically pro-life messages that have been on his semitrailers for 15 years.
“Quite frankly, we never get any bad calls. It’s all good.”
While some companies that have publicly support conservative Christian values have faced hostilities for standing up for their beliefs, Maas says that if a situation like that “pops up” he will “pray that we will be prepared to witness to the truth with love”.
Such a witness is what he says, “life is all about”.
“There’s nothing more important in this world than trying to bring people to the truth, because there’s a lot of people living in misery because of ignorance.”
“It’s our responsibility to have our company honoring God with what we do, and to evangelize in the setting that he has given us.”
“To be honest with you, it’s good. It’s good business.”