It's About Time

So here I am, back at it again after an extended absence. During the summer, I planned on writing often on here, but that plan seemed to have taken a detour. Now I'm back, trying to make amends, and restart with a fresh new post. I apologize if it's scatterbrained, there was a lot of material over the summer that I planned on posting but never did. Eventually, hopefully, over the course of the next couple of days, I'll post most of it.

This summer I worked as a waiter at a pizza restaurant. It was a completely new experience for me in many ways. First of all, I got to see things from a waiter's perspective and learned all of the little annoying things that we, as ignorant consumers, often overlook about the ways in which we behave around servers and the ways in which we treat them. Second, I got to learn a lot about build community with coworkers who are very different from you in upbringing, lifestyle, and habits. This was a chance for me to leap out of my comfort zone and befriend new people. Again, it was a terrific experience. Finally, I got to see ways in which the church interacts with the surrounding community by, in a sense, going "undercover".

Oftentimes when we're at church, we treat one another certain ways in a "churchy" fashion. We assume that if you're at church, you must be a Christian, or you must be "searching" so we put on our best guises and treat everyone very nicely and politely, even if you don't like someone. It's the same when you go on a mission trip or a church-sponsored road trip or event. Everyone puts on their "Christian" mask and that's the face they must show everyone they encounter. After all, they're representing the church.

The weird thing, working as a waiter, is that I found myself in this innocuous position of being a Christian in a place where Christians don't generally assume that there are other Christians around. Not that I'm saying Christians don't believe other Christians work at restaurants, but I was a waiter. I'm the guy that brings out your bread, refills your drink, and tries not to make a nuisance of myself when you're having your argument about who gets to use the car the next day. I'm a server. Servers don't get noticed very often.

So here I was, a server, and I got to see what a lot of "Churchy" types said and talked about and did when they weren't necessarily in a Church atmosphere. Sunday morning would come around and our restaurant would get slammed. Large families and church bible studies would come in and sit down and talk about Church politics or the sermon or any number of religious topics while they were eating. And then... they would fight with me over the bill. Nitpicky things like a 20 cent charge for mushrooms, peppers, and onions on a Philly Cheese Steak sub. Or they wouldn't tip. A party of seven or eight would leave their table, and the only tip remaining would be two dollars and some change, for a $50 or $60 meal. Or they would be obnoxious, treating me like they owned me for the hour or so that they sat in my section.

Now imagine what this felt like to me, seeing my brothers and sisters in Christ acting like jerks, just because they didn't really think to consider whether the person serving them, or any of the other people in the restaurant for that matter, were also brothers or sisters.

And this leads to my next question: Why should we only act nice when there are Christians around or there are people around who we would like to convert? Shouldn't we love all the time? Isn't that what Jesus commanded us to do? And if we act one way when we're at church and one way when we're in a restaurant with "those people who work on Sunday mornings", what does that say about the way we act at church? Doesn't that imply that we're faking it?

I think there's a challenge for all believers here. We are not to act one way at church and another in the presence of unbelievers. More so, we are not to give preferential treatment to Christians. I have to wonder if my tables would have acted differently if my restaurant was a church's dinner theater or if they knew I was also a Christian. Would they have been more considerate? Would they have tipped like restaurant etiquette mandates? And if so, what does that say about us as a culture? I don't believe this is what Jesus had in mind when he said to go out into all the world.

Finally, something really interesting happened while I was this undercover Christian at Elizabeth's Pizza. Two people witnessed to me in two separate instances. I say "witnessed" because it is a technical term that my Christian readership will understand, since we've invented all of these churchy words that only Christians know. But if anyone else is reading this, it means that two people evangelized to me, proselytized to an extent. Shared a glimpse of their faith in a purposeful way.

From these two encounters, I learned something. There is a right way to evangelize and there is a wrong way.

The first group was a table of three, two men and a woman. The entire time they were in my section, they made themselves a pain. The food wasn't good enough. They argued with the bill. They made things very difficult for me, and with four other tables all clamoring for attention, they demanded to be first.

When I returned their credit card ticket, the woman leaned forward and said," Do you know that God has a plan for your life?"

I replied, "Yes." And then I left.

That encounter left me angry, bitter, resentful, and rebellious. If I hadn't already been a believer, I wouldn't have wanted to become one after that. Not only did this table treat me like dirt, they then had the audacity to say something dogmatically and with such matter-of-fact that it was as if they were patting themselves on the back for their own self-confidence. More so, the timing was off. I was swamped with tables. Food was up. Drinks needed refilling. I didn't have time to stop and have a one-sided theological discussion with a table that already didn't like me to begin with. The result was that this sort of "evangelism" meant nothing. It did nothing but made me angry.

And then they left a bad tip. The end of story 1.

The second encounter I had really made an impression on me. Two men came in for lunch, and when I brought out their food, they immediately said, "Excuse me, son, what's your name?" And I replied, "Kris."

"Well, Kris, we're going to pray for our food, but we were wondering if there was anything we could pray for you about as well?"

"Um, school I guess."

"School? Neat. Where do you go to school?"

"UNC."

"UNC... Is that the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill?"

"Yeah, it is."

"Wow, that's a good school. What are you studying?"

"History, Media Production, and Creative Writing."

"Well, we'll definitely be praying for you as you get ready to go back to school. Thank you, Kris."

I left to go tend to my other tables. When this table finished, they thanked me for my time, and they left me one of their cards and a bible verse on their bill tray. That was it. No heavy handed, "God has a plan for you." Just "Can I pray for you?" The first encounter angered me. The second really impacted me. These two men inquired into the life of a complete stranger. They could not have known that I was already a brother in Christ. They couldn't have known that it would mean a lot to me if someone asked to pray for me out of the blue. They were kind, they were generous, they were thoughtful, and they loved. Unlike the first table, they seemed to actually care about the fact that I wasn't just their waiter but a real, live person. That made all the difference. I wouldn't have cared if they left me nothing as a tip. They loved.

This is what I learned: There is a right way and a wrong way to represent Christ to your community. The wrong way doesn't care about people as people, it doesn't care about treating you well, and it throws around slogans that your pastor at church has told you that you need to tell people as often as possible. The right way cares about people, it loves people, it inquires of people, and it invests in people. The right way lives in such a manner that you are drawn by sheer wonder and curiosity to know more.

I e-mailed the man who left me his card. I thanked him for his act of kindness and his prayer. It meant the world to me, and he never knew. And not knowing, he still acted. That is love.