By Don Emmerich
“If you don’t even know where the dish room is,” Barbara said, glaring at me with what could only be contempt, “then you shouldn’t be working here. I don’t know why they hire temps anyway.” With that she walked away, leaving me alone in the back aisle, still without any forks.
Yes, life as a banquet server was never easy, especially when I was assigned to work at a hotel I’d never been to before. But, not to be discouraged, I walked down the employee hallway, looking inside one room after another. Stepping inside a ballroom, where some people were celebrating a fiftieth wedding anniversary, I spotted another server, a twenty-something guy leaning against the wall, typing a text-message on his cell phone. “Excuse me,” I said, “do you know where the dish room is?” He looked up at me, smiled, and then uttered what sounded like a mixture of Russian and English. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t understand.” Still smiling, he looked back down and resumed text-messaging.
Somehow or other, I finally made my way to the dish room, only to learn that they didn’t have any forks. So I continued looking and eventually found an entire tub of spare forks in the restaurant.
“What are you doing with that?” a waiter named Manny asked me. I explained my plight. Manny just shook his head and told me he needed the forks for breakfast the following morning.
“But my banquet starts in a few minutes,” I pleaded.
“Sorry,” Manny said, not really sounding all that sorry.
I continued to plead. He continued to resist. So I finally gave up and returned to my ballroom, having no idea what I was going to do. As I stepped into the ballroom, I saw a middle-aged woman named Juanita placing forks on the tables. “Where’d you find these?” I asked.
“They say you have no forks.” She looked up and smiled at me. “So I find forks.”
Looking back now on this experience, I’m struck by how analogous it is to the Christian life. Like transient banquet servers, we who follow Christ are outsiders. Although we live in the world, we are called to live by a different set of rules. As a result we often find ourselves feeling invisible, lost, confused, out of touch, or faced with hostility.
For this reason, we should be thankful for the helpers God sends our way, those Juanitas who come by, often when we least expect it, and give us a much-needed hand. And for this reason, we should also pray that God would use us to be such helpers and to reach out to outsiders – be they refugees from foreign lands, people new to our neighborhoods, or even lowly banquet servers in desperate need of some silverware.
Tags: November/December, Refuges