Bearing With

Bearing With--Sept. 19, 2016

"I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."[Ephesians 4:1-3]

I didn't want it to happen at a McDonald's.

It shouldn't have happened at a McDonald's.

Revelations of grace are not supposed to happen beside the counter in a local franchise of a multinational corporate behemoth restaurant chain--that seems so ordinary, so worldly, so un-spiritual a place to come face to face with the wonder of how grace starts over with us.

But there I was.  And there it happened.

I was at one of our local McDonald's the other day grabbing a quick bite for the road. And as I waited in line for my turn to place my order, I noticed a rather large, slightly shaggy man in his late fifties with a thick brown mustache that was on the verge of leaving from Magnum, P.I. territory and entering into Yosemite Sam territory.  He was part of a group of maybe four or five who had come in the same vehicle--a decade old SUV whose hood was up in the parking lot, telling the short version of a story of some kind of engine trouble which had necessitated their visit to the Golden Arches. The husky man with the husky mustache was waiting at the counter for his family's order (I'm guessing they were all family, but there were no little children and no clear cookie-cutter pattern to assign everybody to a relationship in a nuclear family), and when the food was ready it was offered to him on two trays. 

"Do you want some help with that?" asked the employee who had just set three or four drinks onto one of the trays (at least one of which was hot coffee and one of which was topped in whipped cream), as well as a heaping collection of burger boxes and fry containers onto the other.  Already, a step beyond what one expects of your average fast-food restaurant cashier--her offer to carry a tray because she could tell they would be top-heavy and hard to balance with one in each hand.

"No, no, I've got it," came the self-confident, mustachioed reply, as he grasped the two trays, each with a single hand precariously gripping it by the slightly angled edge. 

That moment sticks in my memory, because it was almost like I was watching a scene from a movie or television show, in which some cinematographer had carefully orchestrated all of this to unfold in front of my eyes.  The old author's rule known as "Chekhov's gun" says, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."  Well, this felt to me like the same set-up--the clumsy, oafish man at the counter (who looked rather like Mario without the overalls and color-matched hat), the trays full of very full, messy beverages, the possibilities for knocking something over were endless, and I was watching the scene unfold in front of me.  I stepped aside to make sure I wasn't in the man's way at all, and then I turned my head back to face forward, both because I knew that extra eyes on him might make the man with the trays more nervous and lose the balance of the travs, and (honestly) because I was going to be next in line to place an order. 

Then came the THUD.

Then came an exclamation of profanity--a single syllable of scatological anger.

The man had dropped the trays.  Quickly, he scrambled to get still-wrapped burgers back onto one of them, but of course there is no getting a Coke back into a cup.  At least three different drinks were mingling on the floor in a split second--a cola of some stripe, a hot coffee, and the rapidly melting chocolate concoction that was once a chocolate shake--and were making a terrible mess.  He gave a look back to the counter, as if to ask, "Am I gonna have to clean this up?" I stood to the side, watching this all unfold, wondering what the right thing to do might be for a bystander like me.  I watched.

Without so much as a second thought, the server from behind the counter simply said, "I'll get it," and then she went back to work--making new replacement drinks for him.  The man with the mustache offered sheepishly to help clean up if they would give him a mop.  A booth full of college students around the corner snickered.  The man tried to save some face, telling the server that his sandwiches had all been salvaged and that he only had lost the drinks (as if that somehow made the mess smaller than it was). And as she smiled a friendly smile, he attempted to pick up the sandwiches and fries on the one tray and to go to the rest of his family, hoping to disappear from view.

Then came the PLOP.

And a second, different expression of profanity. I believe the man was making some sort of comment as to what sort of animal was the mother of his fallen tray.... The college boys chucked again, barely even trying to mask their scorn for him.

The man in the shaggy mustache had just made things worse.  A second, bigger mess, and all the while the line of other customers was growing.  This would have been a moment for one of the employees behind the counter to give a frustrated sigh, or a righteous defense of why the man was not going to get any new drinks unless he bought new ones.  But instead, the servers worked twice as hard now, on two jobs: cleaning up the mess and getting the man and his family a new tray of drinks (which they would graciously carry to the family at their seats, rather than making them attempt a third precarious journey from counter to table). Some part of me thought I should offer to help or do something, but they seemed to have this down, and they were quite capable of dealing with the situation.

Before long, the family had been given a new round of drinks, and the kitchen staff had mopped up the dining room floor in the restaurant.  No rubbing it in. No "Now you owe me one." No "This is going to cost you." Just... in a word, grace.

One of the lesser-seen dimensions of grace is the way the love of Christ enables us, not simply to forgive some past wrong, but to bear with one another.  That means grace enables us to keep living with one another, to keep on accepting each other.  Grace makes it possible for us to start over with each other, and to go right on serving the people who have wronged us or left messes for us to clean up.  Otherwise, it would be awfully easy and understandable for us to become bitter all the time at every little mistake or careless word.

In  the restaurant, the man in the mustache brought on his own troubles in a sense, but in another sense, he got an unlucky moment  when a full cup slipped and fell.  And the servers showed real grace--no lectures, no passive-aggressive revenge, no indignant insistence that he must pay for the lost drinks again.  There was only the unspoken grace of giving him back what he needed, and going right back to work.

I want to be that kind of person.  I want to be able, not simply to speak the sentence, "I forgive you" but to keep doing good for people.  I want to be the kind of person who doesn't demand that there must be payment, that there must be blood so to speak, for wrongs I have endured. I want to have the ability to simply keep on working for the good of the people who keep making messes around me. I want to learn how to bear with others, not just to give speeches where I say "I forgive you."  And, harder still, I want to be able to receive the grace from others who do not bail out on me when I am the one who has made life messier for them. 

For us in this day, the question is whether we will bear with one another the same way.... and whether a wonder of grace might just be seen in the unlikely ordinariness of a Monday morning. 

After all, if the grace of starting over can happen so beautifully even on the floor of a McDonald's.... it can happen wherever this day finds you.

Lord Jesus, as you bear with us, let us bear with one another.