Let me tell you about one such tongue. I’ll tell you a story about a guy named Johnny the Bagger. I heard this during this week from Ken Blanchard. Ken Blanchard and Barbara Glanz have written about Johnny. Barbara is a corporate consultant and a speaker and she was talking one time to 3,000 front-line workers for a supermarket chain, like truck drivers, cashiers and stockers.
She was talking about the power of words. She had posters with great sayings and words on the wall. That is what she does when she does this talk, just to talk about the power that a word can have. She talked about how every interaction they would have with another person is the chance to create a memory, a chance to bless somebody’s life, a chance to speak a word of healing, apples of gold. She told some stories about how this could happen. Then she went home. This is what Barbara writes:
About a month later I got a call from a front line customer contact person a 19-year-old bagger named Johnny. The caller, who proudly informed me that he had Downs Syndrome, told me his story:
Barbara, I liked what you talked about but I didn’t think I could do anything special for our customers, after all, I’m just a bagger.
Then he had an idea. He decided every night when he came home from work he would find a really good thought for the day—for the next day. If he couldn’t find one someplace, he would make one up. Then every night he and his dad would sit down by the computer and his dad would help him enter the saying six times a page on a computer and then Johnny would sit there and print off 50 pages. Then he would take a pair of scissors and cut off 300 copies and then he would sign his name to every one of them.
Then he would put the stack of them next to him while he worked the next day and every time he finished bagging someone’s groceries, he would put his saying on top of the last bag. Then he would stop and he would look the person in the eye and say:
I put a great saying in your bag. I hope it helps you have a good day. Thanks for coming in.
That was Johnny the Bagger.
A month later Barbara got a call from the store manager who said:
Barbara, you won’t believe what’s happened here. I was making my rounds. When I got to the cashier lines, the line at Johnny’s checkout was three times longer than anybody else’s. It went all the way down the frozen foods aisle.
So he got on the loud speaker to get more checkout lines open, but they couldn’t get any of the customers to move out of Johnny’s line. They all said:
That’s okay, we’ll wait. We want to be in Johnny’s line.
One woman came up to him, grabbed his hand:
I used to shop in your store once a week, now I come in every time I go by
because I want to see Johnny. I want to get Johnny’s thought for the day.
Do you know who the most important person in that store is? It’s Johnny the Bagger. He’s not at the top of the Org Chart. He is for sure not making the most money. He’s the most important person in that store.
A few months later the manager called Barbara back. He said:
Barbara, you’re not going to believe this, Johnny is transforming our store. He is changing the culture in our store. When the Floral Department has a broken flower or an unused corsage, they used to just throw it away. Now they go out into the aisles and they find an elderly woman or a little girl and they pin it on them. The guys who make our shopping carts are working on wheels that actually work. The whole culture of the store is being changed.
I will tell you why Ken was so excited about this story. Over the last ten years of his life, Ken has become a fully devoted follower of Jesus. And this picture is a picture of the kind of thing Jesus does through people. Because, Jesus says, in His kingdom, the last are first. And, the servants are the greatest of all. The people who give end up being the ones that receive. Those who sacrifice and are willing to lose their life, they’re the ones that get them back. And He said our prayer is supposed to be:
God Your kingdom come, Your will be done, and make up there come down here.
And it can happen in a grocery store. It can happen anywhere.
[Once again, that was an illustration J.O. used in his 7/31/05 sermon]
