God Likes His Bacon Crispy...

I think God came into my diner today. Ok, not really, but a customer did come in that shed light on God for me. I'll explain...

I work twice a week at a diner. A real old school diner with a cash register that doesn't go any higher than $5.99 and certainly doesn't take credit cards. A diner with a counter, and regulars and the "everybody knows your name" feel. On Monday's my station is the counter. The counter is both the best and worst station. You can always count on the regulars who come in once or twice a day; and they generally order the same thing every time, so it's easy to take care of them. But beyond the regulars you have no idea who will sit down at your counter, or if anyone will sit at all. So you could wind up with the creepy creepers who sit creepily leering at you and creepily sipping their coffee. Or, you could wind up with no customers. Or you could wind up with 12 people who all sit down at the same time and wanted their coffee like, 6 minutes ago. Oh, and when you work the counter you also have the boss, Bill, breathing down your neck, watching your every move, and shouting your name the second your food hits the window. In other words: life on the counter is a barrel of monkeys.

So there I am, minding my own waitress business, when a very unassuming older gentleman sits down at my counter. And by almost all accounts he is unremarkable. I don't mean this in a bad way, by diner standards that's probably a compliment. Remarkable usually means creepy. But there was something about him that stopped me. He had this weird look on his face. He looked at me almost as though he knew me, knew all about me, and was so excited to be sitting across the counter from me. There was a weird excitement that seemed uncontainable. And none of this had a sleazy or shady affect to it. All right, it was weird. And if I hadn't made the following connection, I would have written the whole thing off as a awkward encounter with a slightly creepy old man. And while I can't quite put the look on his face into the right words, all I could think in the 30 seconds after that brief encounter was that something about the look in his eyes and the excitement on his face made me think of God. For some reason I imagined that this is the look God would have on his face if he were to meet me face to face. There was that uncontainable excitement that I can only hope God has on his face when He sees me.

I've been learning a lot about God's love and experiencing it in whole new ways. And there is something almost unbelievable about it for me. Something maybe I just don't dare to believe. I have an amazing friend/mentor, Bryan, who has spent the last year trying to help me believe that when God looks at me, He smiles. And I have another beautiful friend, Devon, who thinks that God "gushes with love" when He thinks about me. And when I really stop to think about that, when I try to hold those thoughts in my head, it almost feels too good, too impossible to believe. But that guy in the diner (God perhaps?) gave me a glimpse of what that would actually, literally look like. So while I hope that a face to face encounter with God will be a little more profound, I can't ignore the encounter God used with an ordinary man to bless me today.