But the Greatest of These is Love

I started this as a rant about governmental and even private beaurocracies that exclude you from aid if you DO have a job, but the longer I wrote . . . I don’t know how to end my writing on a negative note. For all my defenses of tragedies, I don’t think I could ever actually write one. I haven’t been doing very well with tips for the last three months. People don’t like emotional waitresses or waitresses that have just shut off their emotions, because they can’t do them right then. So I’ve seen a marked difference from what I used to make as “one of the best” to what I make now as I just put one foot in front of another and occassionally have a much welcomed lapse into the “old Abi” that my manager says she’s confident she will see again.

There is one thing that is interesting about all of this. I noticed it as soon as I started waiting tables, and then it came to mind again yesterday. When I first started and wasn’t really very good yet, I was always so increadibly touched and amazed when I got a really awesome tip from a table I hadn’t done well with or had downright messed up. I remember standing there in my section one day over a year ago, looking down at a good tip I’d gotten from a table that I thought would stiff me. “This is grace,” I thought to myself. “I didn’t deserve it—but they gave it anyway.”

So yesterday the hosts kept seating me more tables than is the “legal limit” according to company standards, one of them being a large party, and I had to go to the manager and tell him that he HAD to make the hosts STOP doing that, because I was about to loose my mind! Even under the best of circumstances I was having trouble focusing yesterday, and hugely stressed even without the added bonus of being crazy busy . . . I had several tables tip me HUGE! A couple that I thought for SURE would be mad at me weren’t. One tipped me a little over thirty percent of their ticket. The large party tipped me and my section partner thirty dollars over their eighteen percent automatic gratuity, and I realized after they left that I’d forgotten to get something they’d asked for clear at the beginning of the meal.

What a simple and yet profound picture of grace. You were working for it, striving for it, but so clearly didn’t deserve it. When it came right down to it, you had screwed up too bad to deserve it—and yet it was so freely given. Sometimes our minds get so caught up in the theology of grace in terms of a moral belief system that doesn’t handle anything concrete and touchable. And then you get out in the work force, in a proffession with only suggested fees that cannot be inforced (tips), and it cuts away all of the symantics and replaces it with cold hard cash, real debt, something touchable that translates into actual bills paid.

“This is grace,” I have thought on so many occassions. And as I sit here typing this, I think . . . and laugh. I still can’t find this refference, but somewhere there is a passage that talks about how my God owns the cattle on a thousand hills, so—to paraphrase—what the HECK am I worried about? Yeah, I have huge medical bills, but if God will lead me into a life with a chronic illness for which there is no cure, He can and will take care of all the pieces. If even when I screw up, I still have tables tip me well, what makes me think He can’t do anything more miraculous? All I have to do is trust that regardless of if He gives me what I think I need, He IS giving me what I need—whether I can see it or not. If that is grace, then this, THIS right here—the trust that He will take care of me even if I can’t see how or when--this is faith.

I smile again; “But the greatest of these is Love.” Love gives me the heart to even HAVE the faith instead of fear. Love gives me the eyes to see His grace in such simple circumstances. Yes, the greatest of these is Love—HIS love, and the love I have for Him from which all else springs. This is grace. This is faith. This is LOVE.