The UPS Delivery System

I was recently watching a business documentary on the shipping and logistics techniques of FedEx and UPS.  Many of you have probably heard me talk about my several years of working for United Parcel Service in Dallas during my seminary years. It was a very, very fast-moving environment. Everyone who worked with me on the primary sort aisle was a high-end college or grad student – all young and healthy guys who could memorize thousands of numbers (zip codes) and also re-arrange on the fly how they would all be grouped.

UPS has the 9th largest airline in the world

I have never worked harder in my life. It was a part-time job, and I’ve always said that you’d drop before you made it to eight hours! We were paid really well… at a rate that even today, over 30 years later, would be a decent wage.

Something I was very proud of is that I was undefeated in a particular test they would give us on eye-hand coordination. The supervisor would show you a grid chart of numbers, and you were timed as to how quickly you could put your fingers on the numbers in consecutive order.

UPS is the most efficient outfit I have ever seen. They timed everything for proficient operation. So, in this modern technological age, I guess I should not be surprised that the job I did is now completely automated with computer tags, scanners, and mechanical devices. These advances came a couple decades too late for my sciatic nerve – which reminds me from time to time of my years in Dallas.

However, the documentary presented one area where the continued personal touch of a human – the delivery guy – was indispensable. Everything else can fall apart if that person acts like a jerk!

The Gospel Message Delivery System

There are incredible advances as well in the resources for the Gospel to be presented to lost people. We have tracts and books and blogs and videos and web pages … literally libraries of materials to communicate the message of eternal truth. Yet it is still a practically indispensable element for there to be a delivery person who communicates the truth by a quality of life and capacity for verbally witnessing.

Romans 10 says this: “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?”

As I said in my opening sermon of the year: “There is no growth path forward for TSF that does not include a church family who cares about lost people and is actively communicating it to people.”  The days of people just flocking through our doors out of curiosity are gone. We need to deliver the truth to them.