Have you ever had a longing for Waffle House hashbrowns? That’s what I had. It was approaching lunchtime, I’d missed breakfast, and I could only focus on sitting down in a booth at the Waffle House and ordering hashbrowns. All I had to do was get in the car and go. Going was easy, but getting there was a little more challenging. The Waffle House was in the back of a run-down parking lot, between a demolished antique mall and a gas station just off a cramped interstate exit. Although it is open 24 hours a day, it never looked fully open.
Even when packed, given the peculiarities of the parking and overall late post-modern decay in which it sat, you felt like you were taking a chance when walking up to the front door. Would this be the first time they’d be closed? No, they were open. They always were. You can’t count on many things in life, but you can count on the Waffle House to be available. It is one of life’s most basic lessons, one we should learn in Kindergarten: don’t judge a book by its cover or a Waffle House by its parking lot. Open the book and open the door. You will find a counter, a table, and a momentary home. You will also find a chaotic dance unlike any other on planet Earth.
The lunch rush at Waffle House is akin to running triage on a battlefield medical hospital. Who needs help, and who needs it the quickest? If a server gets behind or stays on break for a few minutes longer than planned, the number of tables needing to be cleaned can quickly increase from one to five in a matter of seconds. It is then the backup starts to occur. Where will the new customers sit, who will get their refills, and who will take the orders from the man who only wants hashbrowns for lunch? It is a delicate dance fueled by caffeine, people running low on cigarettes, short lunch breaks, family crises, and made hungry by the ever-present smell of bacon.
Our waitress disappeared shortly after we found two empty seats at the counter. If you’re up for it, the counter provides the best seats in the house. You can hear the cook sing and watch the dynamics unfold between the overworked manager and the other remaining waitress, determined to work only on her side of the restaurant. All of this is free of charge, while John Denver’s version of “Some Days Are Diamonds, Some Days Are Stones” narrates this unfolding reality.
After nearly fifteen minutes, our waitress reappeared. There had been some discussion between the manager and the other staff about whether she would ever return. “Had she just walked out?” asked the manager once. I was an innocent bystander for this staff meeting. Needing a tea refill and sitting only six inches away (and as they were shouting), I couldn’t help but be a party to the conversation.
She did. I don’t know what happened on her break, who she’d spoken with, what occurred, or anything about her life. I knew whatever went down was awful; her life was falling apart; she had been crying, shaking, her voice was quivering, and she could hardly function. Suddenly, my hashbrowns and two eggs over easy seemed trivial. It wasn’t my place to ask or intrude on this woman’s pain. For all I knew, the manager would fire her for taking too long on break. Maybe she’d just been dumped, kicked out of her house, or experienced many things people in similar states had brought to me in my office at the church.
As she began composing herself and busing the table backlog, my wife and I hatched a plan to help. We’d both order big. This would be our main meal of the day. We’d go for platters and have our hashbrowns chunked and covered with bacon, toast, and everything. The bill wasn’t that much; it was a little over $25.00. While we couldn’t pray with her, we prayed for her and left a 120% tip: I called it grace and then some.
How do you help in a situation like this? How do you bring Jesus to the Waffle House? We didn’t know what she was going through, but whatever it was, it was traumatic, and her livelihood might be at risk. One option was to offer thoughts and prayers. A second choice would be to become the answer to her prayer, in a small way, and reflect a little Grace her way, the same way God returns abundant, unmerited, underserving Grace toward us when we least expect it.
We paid our bill and slipped out the door as quickly as possible. We didn’t want to be there when she found the Grace tip. “We became like angels today,” I said to my wife. “Yes, angels leaving the Waffle House in a Camry who found hashbrowns to be a means of grace.”
So the next time you’ve got a hankering for hashbrowns or breakfast, swing into one of those dimly lit churches by the highway, where Grace is served up on demand. It’s not on the menu. You don’t have to ask for it. Jesus is there somewhere, behind the counter or in a booth, just waiting to help you answer a prayer made as the jukebox plays on into the night.