I'm Thinking Arby's...

I have a sentimental thing for Arby’s because they got their start in my hometown of Youngstown, Ohio. I wouldn’t say their food is that awesome but I do enjoy it as a change of pace from the regular hamburger joints.

Tonight I took my nine year old son out to Arby’s because his mom is out of town taking care of her mother who is not feeling well. I didn’t feel like cooking dinner cause I’m lazy! When we walked into the restaurant at 6:00 PM we found the floors soaking wet and many chairs on top of the tables. Was the place closed? Did they have a major plumbing problem? Some kind of accident? What was going on?

The answer: Nothing was wrong; they just decided to start cleaning the floors. Okay, --I am big on the idea of having a clean place to eat ---but at 6:00 PM when folks are coming in to eat dinner? And we are not talking about a section that was “coned” off. The entire restaurant floor was soaked. And it wasn’t some 16 year old kid who didn’t know any better, I saw the manager squeegeeing the floors. Not only was it a little dangerous to navigate around the very wet floors and buckets and mops, but there were people everywhere.

My point to all this is to remind ourselves that many times we put up unnecessary obstacles that make it difficult for people to receive our message or buy our product. I’m glad that Arby’s believes in having clean floors but couldn’t they have waited till after the peak time to clean?

The problem is we don’t remember what it felt like walking into a different church for the first time. We don’t put ourselves in the shoes of an outsider because we have gotten comfortable. We have stopped caring because we are comfortable.

I’ll go back to Arby’s, I’m not mad at them. I didn’t fall on my butt and break anything. The food was okay. In fact I’m thankful for the experience there tonight because it reminded me of some important principles; don’t make things difficult for your customers. And as a pastor, I don’t want to make it difficult for visitors at my church to receive the wonderful message of God’s love for them.