I once had a Waffle House Experience.
If you haven’t been to the South, a Waffle House restaurant is located on just about every freeway off-ramp throughout the Carolinas and Georgia (and perhaps beyond). They all look alike, serve the same food, attract the same clientele, and operate in the same manner. So much alike are they, you can stop for breakfast at one Waffle House and then stop in at another one three hundred miles later and feel like you really didn’t move and that you made no progress at all. They provide security for those who find comfort in the predictable – a safe haven from the scary world out there where things are not so tidily managed.
I felt like this in 1995 when Loretta and I visited a tent meeting. We had been out of the Assembly for five years and thought we would take one last look at our past before we moved to North Carolina.
We made our way across the long Ralph’s market parking lot, across Harbor Boulevard, across the long grass field into the blue and white, banner strung tent guarded by alert doorkeepers. We took our seats on the awkwardly slanted white folding chairs as the smell of fermenting grass brought back the memories of tent meetings past.
In the corner, the sound of a seal in distress moved us from conversation to attention. We were relieved to find that it was merely a long time musical brother (who’s hair grayed greatly in the previous five years) who was leading us along with his trombone. Tent meetings 1995 had begun:
'Tis the grandest theme through the ages rung;
'Tis the grandest theme for a mortal tongue;
'Tis the grandest theme that the world ever sung,
Our God is able to deliver thee
Deliver thee? Deliver the what? Oh, yes. Deliver you. Our God is able to deliver you. At least that is the way people talk in the present age.
Even though I had been gone for five years, I could have written the script. The style of announcements, the order of service, the same jokes the MC made as he bumped into the microphone, the choice of hymns, the same earnest testimony from a college students using the same catch phrases, the same presentation of the gospel to the same lack of visitors. In a day where evangelists are filling baseball stadiums and Promise Keepers is able to gather over a million men on the mall of Washington DC, I guess there was an ironic sense of amusement to find myself back in a Waffle House after all these years.
The oddest experience about the evening was when the mime troop played. It was a different batch of earnest students, but they performed “The Mask”, a mime that originated in the early 1980’s when the group was first established. It was performed exactly as I had seen it a hundred times before. The same script, the same jokes, the same nuances.
What was odd was the way the Saints reacted. They chuckled, guffawed, and howled as if it was the funniest thing they had ever seen. Brothers and sisters who had watched this same piece several times every year for 15 years acting as if this was the most creative and original rendition of situation comedy that they had ever experienced.
Maybe it was.
As we made our way to the back of the tent after the meeting, a young college student who didn’t know me gave me an invitation to a mid-week Bible Study and offered me some tracts. I thanked him politely, but I knew I wouldn’t go.
It was time to pay the check, leave a tip on the counter, get into the car, and head down the highway.
Dave,
I wanted to repost this, it is just so well written...it takes you right back.
Buck
