For years I have been struggling to live as a Christian in this world, especially in the particular industry I have chosen to make a living in while I go to school, the restaurant industry. We are a different kind of people. Most of us stay out late, party a lot, drink a lot, and do a lot of drugs. Notice the consistent use of the word a lot there without much variation. The movie “Waiting” pretty much sums it up. It doesn’t matter if it is Macaroni Grill where we had 30 servers or Brocks where we have five servers, we are pretty different from your average 9 to 5 bunch. Scott, one of the chefs I worked under at Brocks, said that the restaurant work is one of the toughest environments to stay pure. I am not quoting him exactly but I wish I was. He was such a quotable guy. In my first week of work there he said, and I do quote this from memory even a year later, “There are some necessary evils in the world and my mouth is one of them.” I laugh out loud again just thinking about that day.
So, hopefully this will be the first of many posts about what life is like trying to follow Christ as I work in the restaurant industry.
I was listening to Rob Bell, one of the most fantastic preachers I have heard, from his sermon posted on iTunes on 4/26/2008 and just got smacked. It is good when God smacks you with something good like this. I recommend this sermon to all of my Tapestry people (because this is just great Gospel driven stuff) and all of my Beeson friends (because it is great Gospel driven stuff and I think he is preaching up your alley), especially those who like to throw my boy Bell under the bus. Mars Hill Bible Church MI is going through the book of Philippians, VERY SLOWLY. Its great!
In this particular sermon, Rob is preaching on Php 2:3-4 - Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit, but in humility consider others better than yourselves. Each of you should look not only to your own interests, but also to the interests of others. He is hitting on some great stuff, but at 28:30, after talking about the trinity loving together and being in harmonious creativity inviting us in, literally pulling us into it, he starts really getting into this word, “others.” He says, “Its not look to those and serve those who you like, those you normally hang with and its kind of fun to serve them. Essentially the flow of the argument Paul is making is that the one soul, spirit, love, and mind will be encountered in orienting yourself around others. If the trinity orbits and encircles each other and serves each other, then we should serve others in the same way. We should mimic this serving in the trinity by serving others.” He then throws out the name Karl Barth (this guy can hurt your feelings, or simply make you have a man crush on him) and quotes him as saying, “What Paul is getting at here is that the strange, the different, the unintelligible, the subjective aspect of my neighbor, is the garment in which the one thing meets me.” As Rob goes along, he asks if I have anybody in my life that matches the words strange, different, the unintelligible (the person who drives you barking mad), the subjective aspect of a neighbor (man you have to be a German to use a word like that. This person doesn’t know how I set things up to operate and does not function objectively how he universe is supposed to work).
Immediately someone from work pops to mind. There is this guy who I feel like makes it his personal goal for that day to make me wish I had never come to work and maybe wish I had never come to life. Its always something with him. He talks about me nonstop and nobody can or does do anything about it! He breaks down teamwork more than anybody I have ever worked with and he drives everybody crazy. And to top it all off, this guy’s name is the name that Becki wanted to name our first boy. Get that for irony. But then, it hits me. Ugh. Rob explains, “The one thing he was referring to is God’s grace. If you want to truly understand what it means for God to have enveloped you in his grace, peace, forgiveness, hope, and light, then orient yourself around the strange, the different, the unintelligible, the coworker, the person who absolutely sends you out of your gourd. Circle around them and in your frustration and pain of trying to serve them and love them well you will be face to face with what it means for God to have embraced and loved you in all of your strangeness, difference, and unintelligibility. That person who most gets under your skin may in fact be the garment of God’s grace that is coming to you to bring you more fully into the love of God. If I could actually even learn to take one step to circle the interests of that person it would be a step into understanding more fully what it means for God to love and accept me. If I could learn to not hold their past against them, maybe I would come to understand what it means for God to not hold my past against me. Maybe if I could take one lap around them with all of their flaws, I would better understand the God who embraces and loves me in spite of all of my flaws. The OTHER, the one in your midst who most rubs you the wrong way may in fact be the grace of God coming to you, saying I drive you nuts and I am an invitation for you to understand the Trinitarian nature of the universe all the more fully my friend.”
Rob continues to quote Barth, “The claim my neighbor makes on me, on my patience, attention (“oh not again”), consideration (“I would prefer to ignore this”), on my love, is the claim of the one thing. We discover respect for each other, not on this ground or that, perhaps without any grounds, counter to every ground, simply because we are bidden when looking at our neighbor to think of the one thing, of grace.” Rob says, “It is the most frustrating and maddening dimension about this person that is God’s invitation to enter more fully into the grace and peace that God has extended to me. The degree to which this person draws out of me and demands of me things that absolutely infuriate me may in fact be the claim of the one thing and may be God’s grace.”
Wow. So, there it is. The big old gauntlet thrown down by a one two punch of the Holy Spirit brought to me complements of the tag team of Rob Bell and Karl Barth (those two should never be allowed to team up again). There is unmistakably a person in my life who is my “other” to a T! So now I start praying for God to allow me to show him mercy and grace and for me to get the benefit of experiencing his mercy and grace more fully. I have some more thoughts on how this is going but I will save that for my next work post. Surely we can change something.
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