There was a time, not so long ago, when getting a pizza was a whole lot different than it is today. During that time pizza was at the height of its popularity, everyone wanted it. It seems hard to believe, but yes it was much more popular than pizza is today. That’s where this story begins.
It was sometime early in the last century, in a busy urban centre; somewhere in a city a lot like one you know, when a Pizzeria owner had an epiphany of sorts. We’ll call the owner of that Pizzeria, Giuseppe. It was a typical Friday night for Giuseppe’s Pizzeria, the orders were coming in at a fairly steady pace, but on that Friday night Giuseppe realized that there had to be more people that wanted pizza and that for whatever reason they just weren’t buying it.
He knew more pizza lovers had to be out there. He also knew how much he wanted people to enjoy his pies. So with very good intentions Giuseppe did the unthinkable; he did something so outlandish, so abnormal, and so ridiculous, that the world of pizza changed for the next 50 years. You see what Giuseppe did was not at all in accordance to the plan of the Original Pizza Maker, in fact it was against all common sense, and there were serious consequences for his choice; if only Giuseppe had known the negative impact his decision would have on the world of pizza.
That fateful Friday night Giuseppe decided he was going to make 25 extra large pizzas, with all types of toppings; something for everyone. He cleared a big area in the front of his store so that he could set up 5 tables. On each table he placed 5 pizzas and a paper cup, and when he was done he put a sign in his front window that said “XL Pizzas, Pay as Little or as Much as You Want”.
Well he didn’t have that sign hanging in the window for longer than 30 seconds before a person off the street wandered into his store and asked, “What does, pay as little or as much as you want mean”? “Just what it says”, Giuseppe responded. “So what if I don’t have any money”, the straggler quipped. But to his surprise Giuseppe proudly proclaimed, “Don’t worry about it. I want everyone to enjoy my pie. If you have some money leave what you can in one of the paper cups, if not take your pizza and enjoy it. In fact... if you’re really hungry, take two!”
And so it began. It wasn’t more than a couple of days, before Giuseppe’s Pizzeria was the busiest restaurant on the planet. He had hundreds, if not thousands, of people waiting in line on the sidewalks of that tiny little side street; all there for the same thing, cheap pizza. It wasn’t long and other pizza restaurants took notice. From the four corners of the earth pizza restaurant owners began copying Giuseppe. And why wouldn’t they? Reportedly, Giuseppe had ‘sold’ more than 50,000 pizzas in a single week! Other hasty pizza pros, all over the planet, just wanted their slice of the Giuseppe genius, and so they followed his lead.
Unfortunately for them and for all true pizza lovers there was a dark secret that no one was talking about. After 6 months of allowing people to decide what they’d pay for his pizzas, Giuseppe had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Every day he toiled from 9 a.m. till 2 a.m., making pizzas for the endless customers that kept pouring in off the streets., only to receive, in most cases, nothing for his trouble. You see, Giuseppe made excellent pizza, but when given a choice, in the beginning the vast majority of his customers chose to pay only a fraction of what the pizzas cost should have been. And most times they only did that out of, what they perceived to be, social obligation. It wasn’t long before some of those customers began to rationalize and simply take their pizza without paying anything at all. But they would tell themselves that next time they’d pay extra... then they never did.
Over the next 25 years, thousands of pizzeria owners from all around the world had given away their personal fortunes as they served millions of free pizzas, while they tried hopelessly to keep up to the social pressures of what it meant to make and ‘sell’ pizza in their age. Many of the pizzeria owners knew somewhere in their bottom of their hearts that they weren’t using sound business practices by giving away their product; but they felt pressure from the rest of society to keep up with the insane standard that had been set. So against their better judgement, time and time again, pizzeria owners would fight the truth and give their pizza away when they knew they should have been charging the customer a fair price for their product instead.
During those years it was a very dark time for pizza lovers. You see all the pizza that was available was being sold the same way, and because the individual restaurant owners had to lose so much money in order to give away their pizza, the quality of pizza everywhere had become absolutely horrific! Not only did the average pizza have a very low standard of quality, it also tasted terrible. During that time it seemed like no one knew how bad pizza had become; it seemed like everyone forgot that pizza could be, and should have been... delicious. Instead, people were so focused on getting their pizzas for free they ignored the fact that most of the pizzas they’d ever eat weren’t even fit for human consumption.
It took nearly 50 years until Giuseppe finally decided to put an end to the insanity that he had created. On that wonderful day, Giuseppe used wisdom and he closed his pizzeria. He put a sign on the window that said, “Out of money, out of pizza, out of business”. The customers didn’t really care because there were 50 more pizzerias within a 10 minute walk of Giuseppe’s, but nonetheless they wouldn’t be able to freeload at Giuseppe’s any longer. But that wasn’t the last of Giuseppe, no... Giuseppe had a plan.
Secretly, he began preparations for a whole new pizzeria, on the other side of town. It took him a few weeks but after some hard work, and much determination, Giuseppe opened his new pizzeria featuring pizzas that were made with the kind of quality and love that he used to make 50 years earlier, before he ever began giving them away free. In fact he was so certain of the quality of his pizzas that he charged 35% more than he should have charged. Back in those days an XL pie with 3 toppings, at Giuseppe’s, would set a person back a whopping $47.00! His critics thought that he had gone mad; how could a man think that anyone would pay $47.00 for a pizza they could get free somewhere else?
Well that was just it; you couldn’t get a pizza like Giuseppe’s anywhere, in any country, that even came close to the quality of pizza that Giuseppe was making and selling for $47.00. But at first Giuseppe was wondering if he should have even bothered trying, because no one seemed interested in his costly pies. He thought the critics might have been correct. Until the international news organization, BNN, featured Giuseppe and his life story. In the report they gave full account of Giuseppe’s pizza making career and they finished the story on location at his new pizzeria.
It was only the next day when the phone at Giuseppe’s Pizzeria began ringing off the hook. It seemed that there were many people all over the world that were longing for a good pizza again. They wanted to taste the delicious flavour of a well made pie, and they were willing to pay whatever it would cost to get one. In the next six months Giuseppe made $50,000,000,000 as people from all over the earth were ordering pizzas weeks in advance. At one point the demand got so high for great pie that Giuseppe was able to charge $7000 per pizza!
And before long all the other pizza places began trying to charge money for their pizzas too, but somehow that didn’t work. What they didn’t know was that Giuseppe had done something different than they had; he closed his original pizzeria and opened a new pizzeria, in a new location, with a new name. It seemed that the ‘customers’ at the free pizzerias placed a very low value on the pizza they had gotten for free all those years. So even when the owners of those pizzerias improved the quality, leaps and bounds, and then demanded a fair price for their pizzas, the customers had already come to believe that they were bad pizzas because they knew they could get them free at the same pizzeria at an earlier time.
Thankfully everything eventually turned around in the pizza industry, and today you can pay a fair price and get a quality pizza at any one of countless different pizzerias in over 500 countries around the world.
Pizza can be a lot like sex. Girls today are like the pizzeria owners in this story. They don’t think they have a choice; they think they have to give sex to a guy, for little to no commitment, or they won’t ever get a guy in the first place. As a result, guys today are getting a lot of cheap, and or even free sex. Many, many girls have stopped thinking of their virginity as valuable. Instead they have accepted the lie that they have to offer their ‘love’ for free in order to be normal and compete with other girls. And just who is it that benefits the most?
God intended for a man and a woman to be wed. He intended that the man would have to make sacrifices in order to have sex with a woman. He would have to first love her, and then marry her. And then marriage wasn’t temporary... IT WAS PERMANENT! So you see, in God’s plan, sex has a very high cost associated with it. And so in this day and age, the woman who values that responsibility and who cares about God enough to not live with every boyfriend she meets, and to not have sex before marriage---that woman won’t have a huge line of guys waiting on the sidewalk to ask her out. But word will soon get out, and the true guys out there will start calling, because there are guys who really want a quality girl but don’t know where to find one.
Please don’t worry, if you’re like Giuseppe and you’ve already started giving your pizzas away, it’s not too late, you can start over. Confess to Jesus that you’ve sinned against God, tell Him you’re sorry and stop your sinning. Believe in Him as your Saviour, and like Giuseppe you’ll be able to open a brand new business and start to demand a higher price for yourself. Don’t give yourself away any longer. God intended for you to be loved, not used. He loves you, and so should your boyfriend. If your boyfriend doesn’t love you enough to wait for sex, then maybe your boyfriend doesn’t love you at all. Think about it.
Thursday, July 22, 2010
Thursday, July 8, 2010
Right Angle
Going out into the world and preaching the Gospel can be a very daunting task. Nonetheless, Christ calls each and every one of His flock to share His gift with the world. When Christ, risen, came upon Peter who had returned to fishing instead of preaching the Gospel, what did Jesus say to Peter? John 21: 15-17
But still it seems there is a litany of reasons why it seems impossible sometimes to actually step out on that limb of faith and publicly share Jesus Christ. Fear is probably the most common of these obstacles. Too many times, it seems, we can be deceived by our own natures and fail to see God’s will. If we understand that sharing Jesus Christ is not of us; not about us; not for us; then maybe we can see God’s will in His plan to evangelize with the truth of the Gospel.
The world does hate the Gospel; let’s face it, the world hates Jesus. Didn’t you a sinner hate the Gospel before God apprehended you? And think about it, what other name is blasphemed more? People use God’s name all the time to swear, but many times those people have false gods anyway. It would seem, however, that when they take the name of Jesus Christ in vain, there is more of a direct intent to use the true God’s name in cursing with their hatred focused toward the Saviour.
There is good news about sharing the Good News, though! When we allow ourselves to be used by God as we love Him, He will show us His mighty work and the power of His truth!
There is a man who loves to have a sanitary and organized kitchen environment. He is quite careful about placing raw meat near other foods in the refrigerator; he won’t place non food items on the area of the counter where he rolls dough; when preparing raw chicken he takes many precautions regarding cross contamination; he is quite careful to avoid getting any hair in food; he will not use the dish rag for anything other than washing dishes or cleaning the counter areas. This man’s love of cleanliness is so genuine that he does not take care of all these things as a duty, but out of love for his work. Because of his love for that work, that same man, who has never worked or been formally trained in the food industry, was recently hired as a manager at a restaurant.
The restaurant that hired him, had many other managers before, but always struggled with the quality standards in their kitchen. Time and time again, the owner of the restaurant would send his acting managers to food safety training courses, and time and time again they would come back to the restaurant with a better standard then when they had left; but only for a little while. With each and every manager that went off to be formally trained in their vocation, it seemed when they returned they had acquired the necessary knowledge to keep good kitchen standards, but they didn’t have a genuine love for those things. As a result, as soon as the newly trained managers had any sort of unfavourable work conditions arise, like being fatigued, or stressed, or very busy, the standards of the kitchen would return to very near what they had been like prior to their training.
So the owner of that restaurant decided to hire a new, different type of recruit; someone who had never been in the restaurant industry at all, but someone who had a pre-existing love for food safety and cleanliness. When he was given the manager job by the restaurant owner, the man who loved his clean kitchen didn’t require much training at all. With some simple procedural training, he was able to keep that restaurant more organized and sanitary than it had ever been kept before. And because he loved his work, he didn’t labour out of duty, but out of love. Yes, he had to be disciplined in his work, and yes he had to perform duties in order to complete his daily tasks. But out of love, his work had much more of an impact than any of the previous, superiorly trained, managers who lacked love for their work.
The Lord loved us while we were still sinners; so much so, that He poured all of His wrath and justice upon His innocent Son and sacrifice, Jesus Christ. Jesus became filth for us. Jesus willingly took the punishment for our sin while He was perfect in word, thought and deed. He paid the price of our filth, for you and me. He was torn from His Father, because of who we are. He could have let us all suffer what we deserve, because we are filthy. We are the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, in our flesh. We must recognize our sin toward God, and hate the cravings our flesh. Without the redeeming justification of our perfect living Saviour, Jesus Christ, we would all suffer an eternity in Hell; a Hell that we deserve, a Hell that is a mere reflection of our evil nature.
But our merciful and loving God allows us to know life in eternity, glorifying Him; because He loves us. By that love and obedience for His Father, Jesus became our sin; He suffered in a way that is incomprehensible for the human mind. There was no self in Jesus, only love for God! If we even catch the tiniest of a glimpse of that love and devotion that Christ so mercifully displayed, how can we do anything but love Him in return? Nothing we have could stand in our way to serving Him, or would be too much to give up! We will die for Him when we know His love! We will no longer serve Him out of religious duty as to vainly attempt to make ourselves better, but instead we will humbly acknowledge our pathetic inability to do so, and rely fully upon His love and sacrifice.
Our faith comes from God above and then does a 90 degree turn of sorts. As we share Jesus Christ crucified, and His Gospel, God gives us His truth in His word in a very vertical sense. Truth comes from Him, not us. So as God shares His truth vertically from His word and testimony with us, and when we’re willing to be used of God, that truth simply makes a right turn and spreads horizontally from the vessels known as our mouths; as it reaches out to death and destruction around us. If we can simply see that when we share the truth of Jesus Christ that we are witnesses, and nothing else, I think we might find courage in the Lord. If we can see ourselves as an intersection where God’s road of truth turns to deliver His word to the lost and dying in this world, maybe we’ll be hard pressed to see ourselves at all. And wouldn’t that be a good thing? John 3: 30
Tim
But still it seems there is a litany of reasons why it seems impossible sometimes to actually step out on that limb of faith and publicly share Jesus Christ. Fear is probably the most common of these obstacles. Too many times, it seems, we can be deceived by our own natures and fail to see God’s will. If we understand that sharing Jesus Christ is not of us; not about us; not for us; then maybe we can see God’s will in His plan to evangelize with the truth of the Gospel.
The world does hate the Gospel; let’s face it, the world hates Jesus. Didn’t you a sinner hate the Gospel before God apprehended you? And think about it, what other name is blasphemed more? People use God’s name all the time to swear, but many times those people have false gods anyway. It would seem, however, that when they take the name of Jesus Christ in vain, there is more of a direct intent to use the true God’s name in cursing with their hatred focused toward the Saviour.
There is good news about sharing the Good News, though! When we allow ourselves to be used by God as we love Him, He will show us His mighty work and the power of His truth!
There is a man who loves to have a sanitary and organized kitchen environment. He is quite careful about placing raw meat near other foods in the refrigerator; he won’t place non food items on the area of the counter where he rolls dough; when preparing raw chicken he takes many precautions regarding cross contamination; he is quite careful to avoid getting any hair in food; he will not use the dish rag for anything other than washing dishes or cleaning the counter areas. This man’s love of cleanliness is so genuine that he does not take care of all these things as a duty, but out of love for his work. Because of his love for that work, that same man, who has never worked or been formally trained in the food industry, was recently hired as a manager at a restaurant.
The restaurant that hired him, had many other managers before, but always struggled with the quality standards in their kitchen. Time and time again, the owner of the restaurant would send his acting managers to food safety training courses, and time and time again they would come back to the restaurant with a better standard then when they had left; but only for a little while. With each and every manager that went off to be formally trained in their vocation, it seemed when they returned they had acquired the necessary knowledge to keep good kitchen standards, but they didn’t have a genuine love for those things. As a result, as soon as the newly trained managers had any sort of unfavourable work conditions arise, like being fatigued, or stressed, or very busy, the standards of the kitchen would return to very near what they had been like prior to their training.
So the owner of that restaurant decided to hire a new, different type of recruit; someone who had never been in the restaurant industry at all, but someone who had a pre-existing love for food safety and cleanliness. When he was given the manager job by the restaurant owner, the man who loved his clean kitchen didn’t require much training at all. With some simple procedural training, he was able to keep that restaurant more organized and sanitary than it had ever been kept before. And because he loved his work, he didn’t labour out of duty, but out of love. Yes, he had to be disciplined in his work, and yes he had to perform duties in order to complete his daily tasks. But out of love, his work had much more of an impact than any of the previous, superiorly trained, managers who lacked love for their work.
The Lord loved us while we were still sinners; so much so, that He poured all of His wrath and justice upon His innocent Son and sacrifice, Jesus Christ. Jesus became filth for us. Jesus willingly took the punishment for our sin while He was perfect in word, thought and deed. He paid the price of our filth, for you and me. He was torn from His Father, because of who we are. He could have let us all suffer what we deserve, because we are filthy. We are the Romans, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees, in our flesh. We must recognize our sin toward God, and hate the cravings our flesh. Without the redeeming justification of our perfect living Saviour, Jesus Christ, we would all suffer an eternity in Hell; a Hell that we deserve, a Hell that is a mere reflection of our evil nature.
But our merciful and loving God allows us to know life in eternity, glorifying Him; because He loves us. By that love and obedience for His Father, Jesus became our sin; He suffered in a way that is incomprehensible for the human mind. There was no self in Jesus, only love for God! If we even catch the tiniest of a glimpse of that love and devotion that Christ so mercifully displayed, how can we do anything but love Him in return? Nothing we have could stand in our way to serving Him, or would be too much to give up! We will die for Him when we know His love! We will no longer serve Him out of religious duty as to vainly attempt to make ourselves better, but instead we will humbly acknowledge our pathetic inability to do so, and rely fully upon His love and sacrifice.
Our faith comes from God above and then does a 90 degree turn of sorts. As we share Jesus Christ crucified, and His Gospel, God gives us His truth in His word in a very vertical sense. Truth comes from Him, not us. So as God shares His truth vertically from His word and testimony with us, and when we’re willing to be used of God, that truth simply makes a right turn and spreads horizontally from the vessels known as our mouths; as it reaches out to death and destruction around us. If we can simply see that when we share the truth of Jesus Christ that we are witnesses, and nothing else, I think we might find courage in the Lord. If we can see ourselves as an intersection where God’s road of truth turns to deliver His word to the lost and dying in this world, maybe we’ll be hard pressed to see ourselves at all. And wouldn’t that be a good thing? John 3: 30
Tim
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
