Taking the Time to Make a Difference

So what did we go out to see? The three of us – two parents and one son -- went to a department store because of an ad in the local newspaper. The ad promised an additional 15 percent off items already on sale after “the holidays.” The extra savings were to be good only for portions of the Saturday and Sunday following New Year’s Day – so we drove the 10 or so miles to the store’s location and arrived during the advertised hours of the special sale. The focus of this shopping trip was one item – a waffle iron for our son’s home. There might be other bargains there, too, we thought. We were met at the store by a half-dozen or so employees hoping to sell large-ticket items. The small appliance area was virtually empty. We could have had our choice of sales people to show us sofas and other furniture, but no one came forward to help us locate a waffle iron. We found a display of kitchen items, including a waffle iron that had the look and the feel of something that might last for a week – if it were not used more than once or twice. Finally we found a box on a display shelf that contained a more substantial device, twice the price of the one on display but with the promise of longer life. And it would be marked down, we thought. The woman at the check-out counter was eager to point out that “electrics” were not included in the special sale. “Read the fine print” she told us. I asked her to show me where the exclusion was printed in the newspaper ad. It took her several minutes to squint through the several dozen tiny words before she found it. We asked her what she meant by “electrics” and she told us, “anything that you plug in.” “What is on sale?” my wife asked. With a straight face, unbelievably, the cashier responded, “Everything in the store.” Everyone laughed – except the cashier. My son bought the waffle iron anyway – and was immediately warned by the cashier: “If anything goes wrong with it, contact the manufacturer.” She repeated the warning several times before we left the store. She had communicated the meaning clearly: “We sell it, but that’s our only connection with it. Don’t blame us if it doesn’t work.”

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The experience was an unusually direct reinforcement of the always operative advice, “Buyer beware.” Often, though, the advertising enticement is more subtle and the clerks are less cavalier. I can’t help but wonder if we wouldn’t have an easier time making decisions about religion and politics and all of life’s choices if the proponents of various viewpoints were as straightforward and unambiguous as was that clerk in the department store.

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Who gets your attention? Your trust? Whose promises have you believed? What is the basis for your trust in another? Over and over in pondering such questions, I am drawn again and again to the words of Jesus when the emissaries of John the Baptist asked him who he was (Matthew 11). “Are you the one who is to come, or should we look for another?" Jesus said to them in reply, "Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them.” Jesus was straightforward and very clear in his response to those who were searching and questioning. The answers are not in the promise or the prediction, but in the actions that can be seen and heard.

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Take the time to look clearly at what “the world” advertises to us, and compare the promise to the reality. Examine the promise of your own life to those around you. How many exceptions are you making? How many exclusions are buried in the fine print of your public witness?

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