His Life Was In Those Bottles

I don’t recall who first introduced me to Stubbs; it could have been Price Chopper, or Stop & Shop, or Market Basket – but since I first purchased the barbeque sauce produced by Mr. Stubbs in New England it was likely one of these grocery store chains who did me the fine service of introduction.

Amidst the BBQ sauce offerings of the major food companies the bottle of Stubbs stood out as if it wanted to shake my hand and become friends. It was as if the bottle was saying, “I ain’t like the rest of them. Fact is, I don’t reckon I really know why they are all here alongside me, unless it is to show folks the difference between the fake and the real.” Not that I think Mr. Stubbs would have said that about other companies, but if his bottle could have talked it just might have said those words.

On every bottle of Stubbs BBQ is the face of Mr. Stubbs (his real name was Christopher Stubblefield). It’s a face that you want to know, it’s the face of man whose hand you’d like to shake. This man not only put his name on his product (his nickname was Stubbs), he put his face on it. Then there were the words, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m a cook.” I like that – a cook developed this product, a cook who cooked, not a cook who worked in an industrial test kitchen, but a cook who cooked and fed people 52 weeks a year, a cook who ran a restaurant where if the cooking weren’t good he’d go broke.

But then there was another saying from Mr. Christopher Stubblefield on his BBQ sauce, and this is the one that really got me, that still gets me, “My life is in these bottles.” You gotta love a saying like that, a man proud enough of his work to put his face on a bottle and his life in a bottle.

Ever since my first encounter with Stubbs he has been my go-to man for BBQ sauce and he has never let me down. I recall that once when we had friends over for a cookout in Becket, MA that Jody Lampro, our drummer and sometimes bass player, asked me what kind of BBQ sauce we had, and when I said, “Stubbs”, he looked at me knowingly and said, “Stubbs…he’s the man.”

I don’t think many of us approach our work the way Christopher Stubblefield approached his. How many of us would put our name and face on our work? How many of us would say, “My life is in what I did today”? How many of us take pride in what we do, real pride? The pride of workmanship? The pride of integrity? And how many of us find joy in our work?

And if we are professing Christians, are we offering our work to God as an offering, as something beautiful, bearing the image of our Creator? (Colossians 3:23-24).