What Will Ya Have?

When you walk into the famous Varsity restaurant in Atlanta you will not be welcomed with a warm greeting. When you walk through the door a cahier will most likely yell at you from behind the register asking “what will ya have?” before you have even had a chance to look at the menu. The odd thing is that nobody ever gets offended. It is simply part of the experience of the Varsity and it draws hundreds of people from all over the world every day.

When I was I kid my family was traveling through Missouri and we stopped at a place called Lambert’s Café which bears the title “Home of the Throwed Roll.” The roll throwing is not a special technique used by their bakers to make extra fluffy rolls but is in fact the preferred method of roll delivery to each guest’s table. At a normal restaurant, when you want a roll you simply reach into the basket placed on your table but this is not a normal restaurant. At Lambert’s getting a roll is much more interesting. Simply raise your hand in the air and an employee standing at the front of the room will throw it to you. It make sense then, that if you raise your hand for a roll you better be ready to catch but for some reason that thought did not compute in my five year old mind. I raised my hand and got distracted by something only to feel the hot buttery sensation of a huge roll being lobbed at my face while my family erupted in laughter. I was highly offended.

The difference between the two encounters was by the time I visited the Varsity I recognized that things that would normally be very unpleasant were intentionally a part of the experience of being there. If you tell somebody that you are going somewhere then you can expect them to give you a list of all the things you have to see and do, and most of the time they are things that you would never otherwise do. “Oh you are going there? You have to go to this really scary outdoor crab restaurant with all the cats that roam free and eat the leftovers. It is hard to find because it is tucked behind a shady trailer park but they have the best crab legs I have ever had and you have just have to go!”

When I go somewhere new I want to experience it all. Adventures always make better stories than hideouts ever could. Vacation has a way of making unpleasant things very adventurous and exciting, and since vacation is a temporary rendezvous away from home I like to think of Life as one big vacation. Earth is not my home; therefore my time here will not last long so I am deciding to enjoy it.

And since Life is a vacation, there are certain things that I feel like I must see and do to really experience what it means to be human.

Some of these experiences are obviously more desirable than others. Everybody wants to fall in love, admire a sunset over the ocean, and laugh until their sides ache but there is far more to the human experience than that and I feel like we take away from the good things when we spend all of our time avoiding the “bad” things. From birth, we are trained by our experiences to avoid things like rejection, depression and grief at all costs. We run from pain do everything in our power to pretend that death does not exist.

I never want to miss out on what is on the other side of pain.

When I wake up in the morning to the sound of the angry cashier in my head screaming “what will ya have?” I want to answer back with “all of it.”

Give me milk-erupting-from-your-nose laughter and the peace of a quiet morning with a cup of coffee. Give me love in relationships and satisfaction in my accomplishments. Give me dreams for the future and a legacy of the past.

But also give me pain. Mix in a little grief and despair and let me know what it feels like to have my heart ripped out. Let me know what desperation and loneliness feel like.

I know this sounds a little weird but I am coming to realize that our souls were never meant to spend their time avoiding what will be good for them, even if those things hurt. I cannot imagine who I would be if I had successfully avoided the things I thought would kill me.

I would never know the value of friendship and knowing that someone cares for you had I not spent so much time looking for companions to ease my loneliness. How could I experience God providing in ways that only He could provide if I had not been in places where I was desperate for an answer? How could I value every single day of a human life had I not seen firsthand that anybody, no matter how young and undeserving, can go home to Heaven in an instant? Without those deep valleys my mountain tops would be mole hills at best.

We need to feel hurt on purpose because the world around us hurts without giving their consent. We cannot love anybody the way Christ loved people unless we feel what they feel and that is an impossible task when we are concerned solely with our own happiness.

What if, instead of making an empty promise for prayer, that when we heard someone we knew was having a rough time we actually wept for them? Instead of complaining that the nightly news is too depressing, what if we watched stories of pain and despair and let them bother us until we could not sleep at night so the next morning we were driven to action? What if a conversation with our lost friends and family droves us to our knees in prayer instead of to our partners in gossip?

Give it all to me mixed in with my morning cereal. The world around me is constantly cycling through a full range of human emotion and I am missing out if pick and choose what feels best. I want to feel pain so that joy tastes even sweeter. I want to cry with people so that we can laugh together later. I want to feel the burden of a hurting world so that maybe one day I can do something to relieve it. I want to grow old with bags under my eyes and laugh lines on my face, with calloused hands and a soft heart. I may be bruised and battered and limping into Heaven but I will have a story to tell and a testimony on Earth to back it up.