Category Archives: Life reflections

The Split

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Linda and I worked together in Los Angeles, helping street kids have a place to stay, feeding and chatting with homeless people, and generally being Christian between Santa Monica and Hollywood Boulevards.

We found each other online thirty years later and caught up; she’d married and had a daughter who plays the harp and presented her with grandchildren. I’d acquired a PhD, a husband, and a writing career. And our politics were oppositional; if she thought someone was a moral leader, I didn’t, and vice versa.

Participating together on a list of alumni from that ministry organization, Linda found other posters leaned heavily toward her point of view. While I’m sure Linda enjoyed the affirmation, she didn’t celebrate it or assert that majority creates morality. Instead, she and I discussed our thoughts—in front of people who kept interjecting attempted conversation-stoppers because our dialogue was “a waste of time.”

We started with the acceptance that we both wanted our lives to reflect God’s compassion, awesomeness, and desire to have personal relationships with every human on the planet—even them, where “them” equals anybody we mistrusted. If we both wanted the same thing, and both asked God every day to use us for that purpose, why we were on opposite sides of a political chasm where shouts from both sides included “evil,” “outside God’s will” and even “demonic” for the other team?

We came up with three plausible explanations:

  1. God doesn’t exist; we crafted God in our own image and use the concept to prop up our lifestyles. (Linda and I rejected this argument for many reasons I’m not going into here.)
  2. One of us is not praying hard enough, is deluded, or living in sin and can’t hear God (theology moment!) etc. (The list ran heavily to this, with me the delusional one.)
  3. All the good doesn’t rest on one side, despite what we may be thinking (or being told to think) these days. God is not endorsing a political party. Linda and I sorta agreed on this one, although she kept coming back to abortion, wondering, if a political party could be so out of God’s will in one area, could they be morally right in others? I thought the same about LGBTQ discrimination; denying others the right to exist remained ironically unexplored in both cases. Then we talked about Balaam’s donkey (if you don’t know, Google it and give yourself a fun story).

More and more, this is the awareness guiding when I pray and when I think—and those two things are sometimes indistinguishable, which might exacerbate what we’re talking about here. There is no political point of view that encompasses God’s will. God did not create political parties and does not expect everyone to come to The Truth of one political party. They are human arrangements, like the creation of time, that distract us from knowing God as God. I’m not saying don’t get involved in them, I’m saying that the first time you say “God endorses this party” as opposed to “this party’s position on issue X aligns with God’s will as stated in [Bible verse, and you better back it up with context]” you are getting led down a garden path that is more thorns than roses. Watch out for wolves, because guaranteed they are lurking in those unexplored woods to the side.

Linda and I still pray for each other.

Mr. Griffin’s Breakfast

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Since I’m not driving in DC unless fleeing zombies, I parked my car in Springfield and got a hotel the night before the Rural Health Policy Institute. The less said about that hotel, the better, but next morning figuring anything would be better than the basement breakfast offered in that Shining-esque place, I googled “best breakfast in Springfield” and discovered it was .5 miles from me.

Healthy walk, early morning, they opened at 7. And apparently the Silver Diner is famous. Seated and served, I watched the cavern full of faux chrome fill quickly. Hipsters in slouch hats talking computers. Two businessmen in skinny ties, clearly having a power breakfast. The twentysomething sliding into a seat at the counter wearing last night’s party clothes, who ordered a mimosa.

Silver Diner in Springfield, VA

The waitress gave him side-eye.

The hostess Juanita was a jovial woman, chatting up the customers and basically covering for the fact that two people in the kitchen and two on the floor were working the whole diner—which probably sat 150 easy.

And I’m sitting there watching the power brokers and the people taking selfies in a famous restaurant and feeling vague existential dread because I have to go to DC and the last time was 2019 and humanity as we know it is way over with since then, and in comes this little old man. Slouching, not in a slouching hat. He waves and the hostess waves back and he walks past the Please wait to be seated sign to sit in the booth behind me.

The hostess brings him a huge mug of coffee and says, “The two biscuits?”

There is a pause. She repeats the phrase, louder, and he says, “Yes please.”

“You forget your hearing aids again?” From the corner of my eye, I can see her put her hands on her hips and give him a playful remonstrating stance, one foot tapping. She is grinning.

I hear a faint mumble that could have been “Yes ma’am” or “What’s it to you” but either way she laughs and walks past me shaking her head.

I tuck into my delicious and complicated Eggs Benedict. The waitress comes around the bar with two biscuits and gravy. Loudly, she enunciates, “Here are your biscuit, Mr. Griffin.”

I hear a plate land behind me. Then I hear contented chewing. But that might have been me.

A few minutes later the waitress passes by, pauses out of my sight line, says, “You done?”

The man mutters something that takes a good ten seconds.

“That’s okay. I’ll be here tomorrow. Just make sure you pay me. I’ll tell Juanita.”

Mr. Griffin has forgotten his wallet. I wonder briefly if he’s poor and they are giving him dignity for breakfast, but no, she laughs and adds, “Everybody knows you’re good for it.”

Exit shuffling slouchy man, looking well pleased with his breakfast. He has a dab of gravy on his jacket.

I thought the edge of the blue Metro line headed into DC didn’t hold much of a community, but I could be wrong. Either way, Mr. Griffin’s breakfast quelled my existential dread. Sweetness still exists.