Blame it on the Sauce!
Everything is spaghetti’s fault. Well more specifically, it’s spaghetti sauce’s fault. You see up until the 1970’s there were very few spaghetti sauces. There was basically Prego and Ragu, each company with only one kind of spaghetti sauce, now Prego has over 40 different types of spaghetti sauce. Are you seeing the problem yet?
Probably not. But spaghetti sauce changed the world thanks to a guy named Howard Moskowitz. Howard worked for several food companies and he did product research. Companies would hire him to do taste testing with people and to discover what the perfect formula was. Most of his data was so jumbled up that he didn’t know what to do with it, and it was pretty industry standard that you didn’t get clear data from these types of things. Well Howard eventually came to the conclusion that there was no perfect sauce, but there were perfect sauces. By now you probably think I’m crazy, but people thought Howard was crazy too.
There is no one perfect sauce for everyone. But there are groups of people who want different things in their sauces, most of them falling into one of three categories: plain, spicy, extra chunky. This trend in the food industry has spread through almost every other industry in America. Not only do we have dozens of types of pickles, we have dozens of variations of the same computer. If I want to buy a new Mac, I have to decide between a Mac mini, a Mac pro, an iMac, macbook pro, MacBook air, just a Macbook, or the iMac pro. 7 different types of computer just from one company, not to include all the variations 21.5” screen or 27”, three different types of display, how much memory you want, how much storage, mouse or track pad or maybe both? That’s 108 different variations of just the iMac. We no longer live in a one size fits all culture.
We have fallen into a consumer driven mentality, and thanks to the spaghetti we all think we will be able to find the perfect (fill in the blank), and we carry that over to church. We think that there is a perfect church out there or we come up with a list of things we “need” in a church in order to worship God. The church, or God depending on how you look at it, have become things that we consume. People even throw around the phrase “I just wasn’t being fed there”. The big irony for me is that we are the ones who are supposed to be consumed, and it’s all about worshiping God. We’ve gotten a little backwards thanks to spaghetti.
Part of Howard’s research also figured out that people don’t really know what they want, most of the time they haven’t even experienced what they would like most. A third of Americans had no clue they loved extra chunky spaghetti sauce, so when Prego launched an extra chunky variety it changed the industry forever, making $600 million in just 10 years. They just invited people to come experience their sauce and people loved it even though they never knew they needed it. There are millions of Americans who don’t know Jesus, they don’t know they need Jesus. We just need to bring them to the table and let them experience him, or as the Bible says:
“Taste and see that the Lord is good; blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.”
Nathan Persell serves as our Youth Director. When he's not leading devotions and playing basketball with teenagers, he enjoys disc golf and bike riding. Learn more about Nathan here.