Quality control

My daughter works in a factory making dental floss and related hygiene products. Someone noticed a flaw in the packaging that required the unpacking of an entire pallet of dental floss! What was the flaw? The plastic cover wasn’t correctly glued to the paper backing and thus rendering the entire pallet unfit for retail sale. Really? That’s all it took? 

I’m somewhat familiar with quality control. When I used to deliver truckloads of whatever, some products required additional care to ensure they were received claim-free by the end consumer. When John Deere, for example, orders steel parts those parts must be received in near-perfect condition. A high level of quality control allows the customer to purchase a product with confidence that you ‘get what you pay for.’

Where’s the quality control department for the Christian community? 

I mean, really, Harold Camping? Didn’t somebody whisper to him at some point that the Bible itself says that no man knows the time of the Second Coming (Mt. 24:36)? If you take a minute and think about it, you can probably identify a situation where you wish you didn’t actually hear what you thought you heard falling out of a Christian speaker’s mouth. 

Wouldn’t it be awesome if God performed edits of the things we say as we say them? Imagine listening to a sermon and then all of a sudden the pastor’s mouth is moving, but no words are coming out? Oh that? Yeah, he just said something monumentally stupid that got blocked by quality control. No biggie. Let’s move on thankful that the end product contains no defects. 

Maybe that would be nice, but in reality, I think God allows us to hear ‘stupid’ things because the essence of Christianity is not consumption, but participation. Your floss should come perfectly packaged, but the Christian faith requires engagement and careful thought about what we say and careful evaluation of  what we hear.