The Great Leaf Blower Incident
Our Mission
To present Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord to business and professional men and to develop Christian business and professional men to carry out the Great Commission.
Matthew 17.20 observes, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; nothing will be impossible for you. Mustard seeds are really small; really, really small. I don’t know if any of us have faith the size of a mustard seed. Why not?
First, we are immensely self-sufficient. We don’t depend upon nor rely upon anyone but ourselves for the most part. Our experience in this life has taught us to self-protect, self-preserve and self-rely if we are to get what we want or keep from getting what we don’t want. When it comes to moving mountains however, we don’t believe we can.
Second, we have been immensely disappointed. Everyone has let us down at some point in our lives including, we believe, God. This world is far from perfect and all of us have been the recipient of imperfect people not doing what they said they would do for us. Honestly, we too as imperfect people have also failed others. Faith rests on trust so where trust is weak, faith is weak. We haven’t seen anyone moving mountains on our behalf.
All of us have mountains in our life we would like moved. When we look up for God to move them He appears to look down and ask us if we have enough faith. We don’t, and we know it. So the mountains stay: sometimes. Sometimes though, the mountains do move. The cancer is healed. The job comes through. The rescue occurs. The goal is achieved.
My guess is that more often than not, the mountains move. Not because we have faith greater than a mustard seed. Because God has mercy, love and grace greater than our fears, our doubts or our disbelief. God comes through because we cant come through.
In fact, the greater we see the chasm between our abilities and our possibilities the more excited God gets to step into our lives to show Himself strong, loving and present. Yet like a good Father, He also invites us to keep praying, keep seeking, keep trying: drawing us into our best effort so that we are all in.
He does that so that we will proclaim to everyone how great our God is Who went above and beyond anything we imagined or could do because we experienced more from Him than anything we were able to make possible ourselves.
In this way, He increases our faith!
His Opportunities
- Tuesday, November 2nd, the president of CBMC will be in town hosting a special luncheon for sharing more information about this ministry. The lunch will be from 12pm – 1:30pm. Cost is free. Contact Mike if you are interested in attending so we can have a lunch ready for YOU.
- Tuesday, October 18th at the City Rescue Mission from noon until 1pm is your next CBMC Rescue Luncheon. This is your opportunity to serve lunch to the men and women who depend upon the Mission for their meal. Commit Here
CBMC needs your help to continue its ministry to men in the marketplace. Please support CBMC today. DONATE
MONDAY MANNA
A service to the business community
A Publication of CBMC International
October 24, 2016
The Great Leaf Blower Incident
by Jim Mathis
Some time ago my wife suggested I stop patching up my old leaf blower and buy a new one. So I bought one at a local home improvement store. After a few minutes of blowing off the patio, however, I realized I had come very close to cutting off my fingers because there was no guard on the machine’s impeller.
I put it back in the box and returned it to the store. The clerk at the returns desk told me I needed to take it back to another store where she presumed I had bought it, since her store did not sell that brand. It did not take long to figure out someone had purchased a blower at the home improvement store, but then had put another, broken blower in the box and taken it back for a refund.
If the unknown customer’s outright larceny was not bad enough, apparently no one at the home store had bothered to look in the box before they put it back on the shelf. In failing to do so, they could have faced a major lawsuit if I or someone else had been injured using it. It would have been nice if the store had apologized for their error, instead of wrongfully accusing me of not paying attention to what I was buying. Ultimately they did give me a replacement blower. I did open the box to inspect the new one before I left the store.
It may be impossible to avoid the thieves and petty criminals that would return faulty or damaged merchandise to another store, but we can control what goes out the door to our customers.
When I ran a coffeehouse, I always told our staff that a drink wasn’t a mistake until they handed it to a customer. “Double-check everything before you call their name,” I instructed them. We all make bad food, poor pictures, or products that do not work. No one is perfect. The problem comes when we are not competent enough to recognize the problem and fix it before the customer has to deal with it.
Competence comes from experience. In my business as a professional photographer, I have learned to know a good photo when I see it, and make sure the clients only get the best. Nobody sees the bad ones I have produced but me.
This principle applies to any business. We must strive to ensure the car is running right, the food is good, the software works, the tax return is correct, and that nobody gets fingers cutoff because of a missing safety guard. Wrong things happen because of incompetence or not caring about the client or customer.
Adhering to standards of excellence make good sense from a business perspective. When we serve our customers well, they are more likely to patronize us in the future. But there is an even higher reason for always doing our very best:
The Scriptures tell us, “And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him” (Colossians 3:17). If we perform shoddy work, can we in good conscience, “do it in the name of Jesus”? Later in the same chapter it states, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Colossians 3:23). We should be proud to present our work – whatever it is – to God as a precious, even sacrificial gift.
We are also told, “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works…” (Ephesians 2:10). The quality of our work might be the greatest evidence of the genuineness of our faith.
Jim Mathis is the owner of a photography studio in Overland Park, Kansas, specializing in executive, commercial and theatrical portraits, and operates a school of photography. He formerly was a coffee shop manager and executive director of CBMC in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri.
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