It’s amazing how God drops something or someone in your life when you’re least expecting it. My good friend Nathan Boen and I decided to hang out last Friday. We played some pool, got some food, meandered around looking for someplace to sit and talk. Eventually we wandered into a Ruby Tuesday’s after 9, ordering a dessert and chatting. The waitress was an older woman, mid to late forties I’d guess, and cheerful in the manner and facade that waitresses are supposed to maintain whether or not they actually were; we would learn that her manner was not a façade.
After we’d received the check, the place almost empty, the waitress, Michelle, came up and we engaged her in polite chitchat. Instantly she revealed that she’d recently returned from living two years in Mexico. Intrigued, we pressed for details. Here is what she told us:
(I have organized the narrative in a somewhat clearer fashion. And let me just bewail up front the fact that no matter how impressed or awed or impacted you are by this story, the fact that you didn’t hear it from her leaves so much to be desired. I’ll explain later.)
Her husband was in a car accident several years ago. A drunk driver, uninsured, hit him on New Year’s Eve. As a result he was paralyzed and his face was completely destroyed. After a quarter million dollars in surgery bills, he was stable and apparently returned to Mexico, his homeland, where the cost of health care is sufficiently cheaper that it was possible to afford continuing his rehabilitation and reconstruction. After working here for six month and sending money down there, Michelle packed up her things and moved down to be with him and help nurse him back to health.
(Aside: as she recounted his injuries, she batted not an eyelash, maintaining her poise and upbeat demeanor the entire time. This was every bit as impressive as the account itself, in my book.)
She regaled us with stories of life in Mexico. For example, she loathes the smell and taste of beans anymore, since at least 2 of 3 meals featured this staple. Simply put, they were affordable and not much else was. She told of the increasingly remote and tiny villages she passed through until she came to her husband’s family’s residence, far from the metropolitan centers of Mexico. The houses had no running water, and people generally survived on 100 pesos a week; about 8 American dollars. She hauled water from wells and rode burros to town and her other jobs. She trained and raced horses, a lucrative job comparatively, but still worked in the fields. The days were long and hard.
She recounted the extreme stratification between the rich drug lords and the poor serfs subsisting on pennies a day while the rich luxuriated in mansions. If a drug lord told you that you were on their payroll, you accepted or you didn’t survive. Which made her story of standing up to a drug lord that much more impressive. She bluffed him, challenging his willingness to kill an American citizen and thus incur the wrath of an international incident. Apparently the obvious retort, that her body could be buried in the desert and never found, never occurred to the gangster, and though her heart was pounding, her face was calm and hard and she politely declined to work for him. This in addition to the story about the job she quit after three of her bosses were murdered. I think she said that they were killed in front of her, but I might have that wrong. The police were no help; corruption runs rampant in Mexico. She told an amusing story about a race day when she came upon a pile of cocaine in a common area. She was aghast, but the others there assured her there was nothing amiss. However, when someone pulled out some marijuana to smoke, everyone urgently and immediately ordered him to conceal it. It seems that the only people allowed to grow and distribute marijuana are the police, and if you don’t buy it from them, they’ll lock you up for a good long while!
Her husband, meanwhile, had surgery to repair some 48 fractures on his spine, and had his face entirely reconstructed using cartilage and bone from his hips and buttocks. Once paralyzed, he can now walk and talk, lift 25 lbs and ride a horse. He lost some language ability, especially English, and Michelle, who didn’t speak a lick of Spanish when she moved to Mexico, had to learn in order to communicate.
Eventually she came to the realization that if she stayed in Mexico, she would end up dead; in a chauvinistic society where men are killed willy-nilly, a blond foreign woman was in real danger. She was too radical and refused to play along with the powerful, so she decided that she would return to Kansas City. She journeyed to the border, bullied the border guards to let her across instead of spending the night in Tijuana alone and penniless (almost certainly a fatal move), and entered the US with a couple bucks in her pocket. Somehow she made it to Kansas City with basically no money, and within twenty-four hours had contacted her old boss and scored some work with horses, called in a favor with a friend to stay with, and landed a job at Ruby Tuesday’s, even though they weren’t hiring and she didn’t have any waitressing experience, a prerequisite to work there. This is not a woman to be denied or discouraged.
(Aside: she said several times how much she changed from her sojourn in Mexico. She was harder and stronger and more capable than she ever imagined, because she had to be in Mexico or else she would have been dead and her husband soon to follow. She was profoundly thankful for the experience in that way, as well as many others.)
Now, the friend with whom she’d been staying had told her that her favorite horse had died, and that her car had been stolen while she was in Mexico. She had no cause to doubt her friend, and accepted this as true. A few days ago, another friend called her about a horse he’d found that he wanted her to have. She could keep it or sell it for a down payment on her truck, he said, and urged her to come look at it. The horse was in a wretched state, starved and diseased, gelded but wild. She decided to sell it and took it to a dealer. As she was unloading it, she and the horse made eye contact. Instantly she thought, I’ve owned this horse before. This was unlikely, as the man had found it in Oklahoma, bedraggled and apparently even more emaciated than when she saw him. A friend who was accompanying her advised her to sell it, and the dealer offered her $300, but she insisted that she knew this horse and took it home, whereupon she discovered, after examining it, that it was the horse she had been told had died. This made her suspicious and she checked the story about the stolen car, to see whether a police report had been filed. None. She called another friend and asked about it; he replied that her friend had enlisted his help in selling the car.
(Aside: at this point I am mesmerized and astounded. Again, she’s not brooding or angry, or filled with self-pity and despair. The recitation of events is lively and chipper. Though there was a bit of an edge at this point in the story. Little wonder.)
Upon hearing this, she returned to the house, packed her things and demanded her rent back, which she had recently paid. The pernicious two-face took one look at her and reimbursed her. She calmly told her friend that if she ever saw the other walking down the street, it would be better to cross to the other side of the road. Two years in Mexico had put a glint in her eye apparently, and the friend meekly promised so to do. This was the day before we walked into the restaurant.
Boen and I looked at each other in amazement. Mostly we’d been silent, listening to this remarkable tale. You might wonder at its veracity, but I myself have absolutely no doubt as to the truth of what she said. She did give credit to God, though I rather felt like her conception of God was a bit karmic: if she keeps her end of a bargain, He’ll keep His (which He did in healing her husband).
There were other elements to the story, like the notion of working three jobs, which she does here in KC, and how the work ethic of most Americans, and nearly all teenagers, is pathetically abysmal compared to that of the people she saw in Mexico. Indeed, it made her understand why immigrants here work as hard as they do; they can actually make money here to send home to their families. She showed us the calluses on her hands and the cords in her arms that came from backbreaking work in the fields and constant toil with the horses, frequently doing the work of a whole team of ferriers herself. She remarked on the incredible bounty that we have here in the United States, and how we take it so much for granted. She commented on the reverence the people have for Holy Week, Good Friday, and Easter, which are celebrated as religious observances and not as egg hunts.
But I’m less interested in that than the amazing saga she recounted, the hardships and trials she and her family endured (her husband’s father is a paraplegic, and his mother has lung cancer). The determination and will she demonstrated was remarkable; early on in the story, when we’d only heard about a third of it, I commented that it was more inspiring than 80% of the stories that come out of Hollywood. In fact, I’d recommended to Boen the novel Peace Like a River by Leif Enger earlier that evening, and afterwards I mentioned that the book also tells of a family’s trials and triumphs; it is one of the best and most moving books I’ve ever read. I also said that Michelle’s tale was more incredible! And true!
We thanked her profoundly and invited her to attend church on Sunday. Typically, she replied that she works twelve hours on Sundays. Go figure. We were effusive in our praise and thankfulness, and left the place marveling to each other about what we had just experienced. Hitherto it had been a relatively uneventful evening of wandering around, enjoying each other’s company, but nothing special, nothing spectacular. This, now, this was spectacular.
What does it mean? you ask. God knows. Ask Him; I know I will. If nothing else it reminded me of my trip to Nigeria, where I experienced some of the same events and emotions and witnessed similar things from impoverished people with joy in their hearts and fellowship with their neighbors. Will the Lord use it to teach me anything, or direct my life? I know not. As I sit and muse on this, I’m convinced that it might have just been a rainbow. By this I mean it was a gift from the Father to be enjoyed and appreciated and marveled at, nothing more. I tend to over-analyze things, look for meanings or applications too often; somehow, I think this was mainly God sharing His life and stories of His work with us.
Does this mean I can’t take anything away from it? By no means! First, I am awed by the provision of God. I’ve seen this in my own life, but hearing about Michelle’s saga made me realize how insignificant my own struggles have actually been in comparison. I’ve been slogging away at my new job, studying dry financial concepts and feeling woebegone, when probably 2 billion people around the world will never have the opportunity to work and live such a life that the income from that job will afford. How much I take for granted! And Michelle said that about herself! Working 3 jobs, caring for a disabled husband (by the way, I haven’t even thought about the depths of love and dedication she must have to go through what she did for her husband!), and she still thinks she’s taking things for granted! Amazing!
Second, I am struck by the fact that God works in so many more varied ways than we think He does. We think He has to work through us, through Christians, through Christians who believe and live the way we do. If I sat down and talked with Michelle, I’d probably find that her theological concepts of God and salvation and sanctification and the Christian life would be different from mine, and I could probably correct her by referencing the Bible and C. S. Lewis and so on. And you know what? God is not impressed. He wants us to have right notions about Him, true, but He also doesn’t want us to limit what He can do by what we disregard as impossible. “Not that God couldn’t do it, but that He wouldn’t do it that way.” Because we know God! We’ve read the Bible and commentaries and go to church and listen to sermons! And if it’s not covered by one of those mediums, then by Golly it’s not possible that God would do something that way! It all comes back to Humility. Will we allow God to work out things His way? Accept what He does how He does it when He does it where He does it and why He does it? I don’t think that’s too deep a thought to ponder. It’s actually essential. Everything else hinges upon it, doesn’t it?
Mainly, however, what I marvel at is the utter coincidence, the complete inability to dictate events. We’d gone to a bookstore and an ice cream shoppe looking for someplace to sit and talk. If we’d stayed at either place, we would have missed out on this woman’s amazing and inspiring story. But God wanted to share it with us, and He guided us there, to be at that place, at that time when the joint was empty enough that she could stand and talk for 20 minutes without ignoring customers, and to have that particular waitress serving us and willing to share these deeply personal stories with us. I could never have orchestrated it, nor even imagined it. Indeed, Boen and I wished we could have her speak at New Day or at our small group. We suggested that we might take the group here one evening and have her recount the narrative for everyone in it. But the spontenaity would not be there, and the divine appointment element would be missing. It would still probably be fruitful, but it’s so much more meaningful when you know that only the Lord could have orchestrated circumstances. May you have such appointments.
Praise God, from whom all blessings flow!
Praise Him, all creatures here below!
Praise Him, above you Heavenly Host!
Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost!
Amen.
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