Dear Friends, it is good to be back with you in Mankato, relatively snow-less compared to Buffalo where the drifts raised 10 inches or so in the most inconvenient of places.
Between the snows, my spouse and I ventured Saturday morning to a restaurant we hadn’t before visited. A car pulled in beside us just before I opened the truck door. I waved the woman out of her car before exiting our truck, and we had what I would call normal Buffalo chit-chat: Oh, this weather, watch your step in the parking lot, can you believe this, let me get the door for you. Just what I expect in Buffalo. We all entered the restaurant, and we sat in a booth across from the woman. She visited with the owner’s small son as she perused the menu. Since she seemed like a regular, maybe even an employee on her day off, we took our cues from her and ordered the pancakes. After the child went back to the kitchen, the woman ate alone at her table.
My spouse and I, we ate and planned our day and had thirds on our coffees. We asked for the check, and it was a little long in coming. The woman at the other booth said a good-bye to us and headed back into the kitchen, so I built upon my assumption that she was an employee. Leaving the kitchen, she gave us an extra wave and a “Watch out for the weather.” We continued to wait for our check, but very shortly after the woman left out the front door, the owner came out and told us, and the folks in the booth behind us and the table next to us, that the woman had paid for all our breakfasts. “She does that every time she comes in.”
Well, we were all so shocked, and we all began to chatter with each other about why she did this and how nice it was. And my spouse and I continued to speculate about the woman as we walked back out into the parking lot and over the course of the day. Maybe she won the lottery. Maybe she doesn’t have any family. We don’t know her, we can’t ask her what was on her mind and heart, and the reason for her act is impossible to identify. But her act lingers on, the effects reverberate within my personal experience and in the re-telling of the story.
What was possible, what is possible is a moment highlighting human connection beyond knowing and relationship as the essential reality of our human existence. How gratifying that connection, with all of us at the root. How more gratifying still when, as we can in our beloved religious community, ask about and know how we are connected to one another, how we can be more essentially and more deeply connected to one another, how we can create the conditions for better understanding of all of us in the Fellowship and for more robust invitation to those not yet part of our religious life together. More love, more relationship, more deeply-felt and deeply-held connection is always possible, when we purpose to create it.
Looking forward to seeing you all very soon, even in church.
Blessings, Rev. Rita