A story from Internet Monk:
My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili’s a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism, that to say, is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help–her or others.
A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server’s. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, “We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because…”
Are you ready?
“…we do not believe in people working on Sunday.”
The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like “I wouldn’t have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn’t come in,” or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their…uh…Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, “Well, we don’t believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight.” And he did. God bless him.
You’re right to be concerned for your daughter’s soul in this moment.
You mention that she is taking a break from her graduate degree. As a parent, it must be hard to admit that your child works at Chili’s. She proudly serves those delicious Honey Chipotle Crispers. Pride being one of the deadly sins opposed only by humility. The most humble thing would be for her to find more ways to plug her graduate degree at unrelated stories. She has much to learn from you.
As your daughter is critical of church going folks, it does create a bit of an unreliable narrator situation. It is the policy of this site to believe hearsay for entertainment purposes only. So I’ll treat you with the benefit of the doubt, though I defensively doubt it happened that way.
If there even were six church goers at a Chili’s on a Sunday. This seems unlikely because they should have been at church or church-related picnics for at least 16 of those 24 hours. It’s valid that could not cook for themselves as this would be work. Anything involved in food preparation would be work.
This is why the faith relies on sinners. How would we eat without sinning workers? Sinners are the horses that pull their carriages. As the servers at Chili’s are not saved – as evidenced by their baby back ribs – they would not know how to speak in parable. When was the last time you tipped a horse? To pay a sinner would be to pay a horse. No one pays a horse with money. That would be silly.
That money would be used to perpetuate sin. Since God requires one to go to a tip based restaurant, the only kind etiquette move involved is to inform the server of the undesirable situation. This gives the host, waitress, and manager the kind opportunity to address the situation. Which they did. By giving the Church people exactly what they want in a way that lets them feel great about the WWJD discount.
You imply that this would turn your daughter away from religion. Should it not turn her toward the Lord? To know that now you can do anything you want as long as you say Amen. Want to pay less? Just say “Because crucifix” and now you can.
Amen
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