Have you ever received the wrong order at the drive thru? As my family pulled away from a McDonald’s drive thru, we began to open our order. Fairly quickly we realized that we had someone else’s order. The food in our bag was not what we had ordered. What would you have done?

On this particular day, our family was in a hurry. We decided to stop at McDonald’s for a quick meal. The drive thru line crawled rather than moved quickly. We finally ordered, paid, and waited to receive our food.

This whole process had taken several minutes longer than what we really had to give. After receiving the food through the window, I hurredly pulled away rather than looking in the bag first. My mistake. Our order was wrong.

I pulled quickly back around the building, waited again, and then explained the problem. The kind employee welcomed me to pull around the line to the pickup window to receive the right order.

I did. I explained who we were to the pickup window employee. The employee acknowledged me and began to serve us. As she handed us the order, I immediately realized that there were too many bags for what we had ordered. Trying to make things go as smoothly and quickly as possible, I stopped her.

My exact words, “What’s this?! This is not what we ordered!”

She corrected it; we started on our way.

My Children’s Question

As we pulled away, one of my children piped up, “Dad, I think you were rude.”

Before I could respond, the other three chirped in as well, “Yeah, dad, we think you were rude.”

I immediately looked to my wife to defend me. She simply asked, “What if that had been a VOH girl?”

Her question immediately cut to the quick. VOH is a place where struggling teens and young ladies go to get help. I often tell my wife what a privilege it is to try to encourage them when I order my coffee from the coffee shop where they serve while receiving help from VOH.

I would have never said, “What’s this?! This is not our order!” in the tone I chose.

My children and wife were correct; I was wrong. In haste and frustration, I had sinned against this young girl in my tone and attitude.

What Makes This So Bad?

The Apostle Peter writes:

“Beloved, I beg you as sojourners and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts which war against the soul, having your conduct honorable among the Gentiles, that when they speak against you as evildoers, they may, by your good works which they observe, glorify God in the day of visitation” (1 Peter 2:11-12).

Essentially, Peter teaches, as followers of Jesus, we should live in such a way that when we respond to pressure in our lives, those who do not have a relationship with Jesus will one day say in heaven that they were influenced to choose Jesus because of our reaction to the pressure.

The drive thru girl would never say that my response helped her get to heaven.

What about you? In the past week, could the individuals you encountered say that you influenced them toward heaven?

As we begin a new day and week, may we be faithful to live consistent in all our pressures so that those who do not know Jesus will be encouraged by our actions to wonder what makes us different in our response.

I hope you do better than I did in that particular line to that particular young lady.