Drive-thru Christianity

I never quite know where to draw the line…when I’ve stopped seeing God in little things and when I’ve started over-spiritualizing. This one is walking that thin line, I think, but here I go anyway…

So I’m running late the other day (as usual), and run through a Chick-Fil-A for lunch. This is Chick-Fil-A is one of those double drive-thru restaurants, where you go through one lane if the driver is ordering and the other lane if the passenger is ordering. So I’m sitting in the line, a very long which wasn’t moving at all (it was backed up to the street), and thinking, great, class starts in five minutes!, when my eyes slowly drifted over to the passenger lane, which was, as fate would have it, empty. I’m sure mine were not the only eyes that drifted toward the empty lane as I was caught between my empty stomach, my continued tardiness to class, and the frustration with the fact that I was now locked into the line as two more vehicles had pulled in behind me. One of those days.

Then this white SUV (it’s always an SUV) slips past us all, into the passenger lane, orders, and goes through. Immediately my fiendish mind is trying to invent ways, wondering if I could just hop over into the passenger seat, and somehow still manage to drive long enough to get through the passenger lane to get my food. Isn’t it possible to sit on the center console and drive? I mean, there’s that whole gearshift issue, but rural mail carriers do it all the time, right? I mean, surely there’s a way!

It would have been so much more perfect had I just had a passenger in my car. Someone that was there to help me out…hungry or not, we could have gotten through the line by working together in half the time, by teamwork, helping each other out.

(of course, I would have made this fictitious person late for class also, but…)

I heard a pastor speak on community a few weeks ago. That’s become a buzzword of late in our Christian subculture, but there’s something to it. Ecclesiastes tells us that, “Two are better than one because they have a good return for their labor. For if either of them falls, the one will lift up his companion. But woe to the one who falls when there is not another to lift him up” (Ecclesiates 4:9-10, NASB). The thrust, I think, of what God’s trying to tell us is that we just aren’t really experiencing the Christian life if we’re not living in community, closely connected with other Believers. And the bottom line is that we can’t produce that with church programs. It has to come from within us, within our hearts, ultimately from Christ.

He never meant for us to do this alone. Ever wonder why we so often try?