Who's that lady?

“Why is there a woman in our car?”

I wasn’t even listening. I was staring down at the bunless filet-of-fish – I ordered it that way – but I was hoping, for once, the half-piece of cheese would be dead center on the filet. But that has never happened in my experience, and I’m convinced it never will. This time, it was almost touching the fish, but mostly just laying beside it in the box. 

“You had one job,” I muttered.

“Hello, can I help you?” my husband said, as he opened the door to a stranger sitting in the driver seat of our Toyota Rav-4. Hold that thought.

She said, “Oh, is this your car?”

He reluctantly admitted it was, hating to put her in an awkward position. 

She said, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I thought it was mine.” Hold that thought.

Then she continued to tell him how that she had already adjusted the seat to her height, and was sorry for that as well.

He told her, “No problem, I’ll put it back.”

She grabbed her sack of Big Macs, which made me immediately wonder who might be at the counter inside looking down at a bag, and saying, “This is not my McDouble.” Then she proceeded to get out and either find her own car, I guess, or maybe just get in the next random one she found.

I watched as she opened the door of a small sedan which resembled in no shape, form, make, or tax bracket, the Rav-4 SUV. My first thought was, “No wonder she adjusted the seat.” She must have thought, “This is somehow not the right height of the seat in my car.”

It resembled our car about as much as the Little Tikes Cozy Coupe in the garage. 

She hopped right back out, and I thought, “Oh, she had a quicker realization this time.” No, she came and tapped on my window. I rolled the window down, and she said, “I left my sunglasses in the cupholder.” 

I mean – you looked at the cupholder, and all you got was, “What a good place to put my sunglasses”? We exchanged pleasantries and apologies again, and I guess she was on her way. Maybe in the right car? If she was lucky?

I’m not going to be too hard on her about the cupholder thing because . . . well, because . . . Hold that thought.

Way back in the 1900’s, I was going to have supper with one of my girlfriends when she got off work at Freed-Hardeman University. My husband dropped me off on campus, and so she told me just to wait for her in her car if I wanted to, and told me where it was parked. I knew it was a maroon Buick kind of a thing; I had seen it many times. So I did according to plan, and waited in the front seat.

Brother Claude Randolph was the oldest person on the entire university staff, and he was well-loved. As I saw him way across the parking lot, I thought, “Well, there’s Brother Randolph, bless him.” As he got a little closer, I thought, “Well, he’s coming this direction.” But then he got a little closer than I expected, and I thought, “He’s about to open this car door.”

He did.

I said, “Hello Brother Randolph, how are you?”

“Fine. Just Fine!” he answered as if we were shaking hands in the foyer of a Gospel Meeting. 

“I bet this is your car, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, yeah it is.”

I told him who I was waiting on - he knew her - and how incredible it was that they had identical cars parked near one another.

We went with it.

That’s why I had a lot of grace for the woman at the fast food place. That, and something I did one time that was far worse.

Remember when I asked you to hold the cupholder thought?

Okay, here goes, and it feels wrong to put this in print, but one time I was at a yard sale, and didn’t have quite enough cash to pay the whole quarter for my find. I had a sudden realization that I had pennies in a cup in the cupholder of my van at the time. In the excitement of the moment, and hoping I could get back to the table before someone else purchased my treasure, I opened the van door, hoisted myself on the runner, and started digging in the cup for pennies. 

Suddenly my excitement turned to terror in a heartbeat and a throwdown of every cent in my hand. That wasn’t my bag of chips in the passenger seat. (It’s a wonder I hadn’t eaten from it.) Not only had I broken into the wrong car, I was stealing money from it!

So that’s why I followed the Galatians 6:1 protocol pretty closely with the woman we found in our car yesterday. We approached her with a spirit of gentleness, considering our own propensity for sin, french fries, and someone else’s pennies.