me: The Judgmental Schmuck!

It was somewhere around midnight when i slid my body onto the stool at the counter of the Omelette Shop, it's stainless steel top stretching out before me like the battered hull of a WWII battleship. The place was hopping. From my perch on the thinly padded stool i watched as the waitress/cashier/one-woman-cleaning-crew flitted around like an ADHD bee on methamphetamines. The frycook in the kitchen could be seen occasionally thru the pass-thru window working feverishly to prepare greasy culinary delights. "Order IN!", "Order UP!." The verbal tennis match they played as the darkness of night embraced the world outside.

i have eaten in many all night establishments in my lifetime, but this was hands down the busiest i had ever seen one in the Letterman/O'Brian/infomercial hours. In fact, it may have been the busiest i had ever seen an Omelette Shop: period. In the long waits that separated my brief interaction with the haggard waitress; the procurement of a menu, the ordering of my food, the eventual arrival of my meal, refills on that golden elixer- Mountain Dew; i watched the people as they shuffled in and out. These troglodytes of humanity, most seemed uncomfortable in the harsh fluorescent lighting. The stereotypical truck driver: a man in the top tenth percentile of gigantic, his wallet alone was the size of an average human beings head. The smoking pregnant lady, obviously burdened with concern for her unborn child. The mother-daughter team, dressed to the nines in their most recent yard-sale finds. Specimen after specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens, or at least Homo sapiens neanderthalensis, waddled by as i sat, a silent observer.

i was stuck by the fact that "these people" were not like most of the people that i knew or hung out with. i imagined telepathically pulling various friends of mine out of their cozy beds and tele-porting them into a booth here for an artery clogging, animal and vegetable fat dripping, cheeseburger. In my minds eye they looked so lost & out of place. Then i started transplanting folks from my church world into booths, they looked positively terrified, breaking into wide-eyed mumbling intersession for their own safety! i began wonder what the lives of those around me were like. Those ladies probably live in a single-wide with no underpinning and a pack of semi-feral dogs that nap in the expanse of dirt they call a front yard. That truck driver probably keeps two log books and has a fifth of vodka wedged beside his driver seat. The hunchback in the booth loudly slurping cheesy eggs obviously has some deep aversion to shampoo of any kind. The highest I.Q. in the place probably hovered near 85. In my mind it became apparent that i was the odd man out in this room. It gave me some sense of comfort to think that i didn't fit into this base class of humanity.

i finished my meal, feeling quite superior to those i shared the room with, stood patiently at the register as the waitress flitted through the room taking and fulfilling patron's orders. Eventually she was able to make her way to the counter to ring me out, as she converted her own scribbles on the blue and white tab into fiscal data i made pleasant small talk with her. i commented on how incredibly busy they were, how she was doing a good job juggling the triumvirate of supply, demand & customer satisfaction. She smiled politely at the bad jokes i peppered throughout our brief conversation & as she handed me my change asked me a question, "So, you gonna hit the road now or get some sleep?"

At first i was a tad confused. Where would i sleep? Why would i do anything other than finish my drive home? Then enlightenment came and lifted the fog from my reasoning. She assumed i was a truck driver. Me, with my love of art & indie music. Me, with my I.Q. that i felt was solidly above the mid-eighties mark of the other patrons. Me!

Me... with my judgmental attitudes.

Me, with my pomp and arrogance.

Me, the butt head.

"i think i'll try and get some more miles in tonight before i bed down," i replied, completely true. i was defiantly not going to stop until i was home, a "staggering" 45 miles down the road! As i picked my way thru the maze of tables and late-night dinners, i found my eyes took in a different scene. No longer were these a baser class of people, the willfully ignorant red-neck leaches of North America, they were people. People like me.

Jesus once said, "Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. For you will be treated as you treat others. The standard you use in judging is the standard by which you will be judged." What if that extended beyond just "sins" what if that included all the snap judgments we make about others?

Wouldn't that be revolutionary? And uncomfortable.

i made it home & as i got ready for bed, which doesn't entail a great deal for me- i'm all for waking up dressed & ready to go, i looked in the mirror, my unruly facial hair glaring back at me screaming out how well it would go with a faded and stained Dukes of Hazzard t-shirt. "Maybe it's time to shave again."

i know none of this is really new. But really, it's very rare that anyone presents us with new ideas, mostly we just get reminded of the great ideas we already knew and have conveniently forgotten about. Ideas that get pushed to the back of our minds by day-to-day living, business, bitterness & ambition.

Real

i was tired. My body felt like it was made of 180lbs of hot, stiffening play-dough. It was probably pushing 100 degrees, before the heat index. It was humid enough to swim thru the air. To say it was hot outside would be like saying an artic winter is "a bit nippy"- it was downright oppressive. i was propelling my body by sheer will-power. i hate to sleep, it's such a waste of time, and all i wanted to do was curl up somewhere and take a nap. "There has to be more to life than this," i said.

"Welcome to the real world," came the bitting reply from my co-worker. It was a derisive statement that i would hear repeated again and again over the course of the next seven years of my life.

i was a young man; newly married, kid on the way. Dreams of heading off to college with my friends were dashed against the cruel rocks of reality that included providing for a young family. My skill-set, not being very well developed at the time, led me to employment in the flourishing residential building industry around Smith Mountain Lake. It was probably sometime during my first month of employment when i first heard those words. The pace of our work was brisk, in general it was very physically demanding. Often the ex-military guys that wound up working a tenure with us would compare day-to-day work to boot-camp. Now, more than likely you have observed construction workers in action before, so you are thinking, "It can't be that tough... those guys don't move THAT fast," if they move fast at all. Honestly though we worked HARD & FAST every day. The first two weeks don't seem so bad, but after that it begins to wear on you, like running a mile thru a pool of water.

"Welcome to the real world." A world of work; and bills; and responsibility... but also of friends, and family. Recently the idea of "the real world" came back into my thoughts. i was visiting my sister, she lives about 20 minutes north of Myrtle Beach: sea-side-vacation-mecca of the Mid-Atlantic Coastline. We rode down to Myrtle Beach and for the first time in my life i went to "The Boardwalk". If you have never been there it is acre after of acre of brightly painted store fronts, absolutely ridiculous store fronts. You can buy anything you never needed there. Whole stores devoted to flip-flop commerce or packed wall-to-wall with absurd plastic garden signs. There are outlets filled with kites, emporiums of all things redneck, boutique after boutique devoted to tacky t-shirts. As we strolled around this gigantic market, painted in a color scheme befitting the teletubbies or a subdivision from Tim Burton's Edward Scissor hands, i kept thinking, "This isn't real." Obviously it is really there, but it's not real. Maybe it was the rocks, that aren't real rocks- since when did planet earth become so devoid of... well of earth- that we have to fabricate artificial pieces of it for decoration? It could have been the twenty two foot tall frog dressed like a Jimmy Buffett fan. Or was it just the fact that here i was surrounded by stores that are thriving with business and few, if any, are selling anything that is necessary for human life? It was like strolling through a plastic world.

i thought, "This is so far from my back-packing trips. At least those are real." But are they? Admittedly the danger is real, when it's snowing and you don't have a warm bed to curl up in, the cold is a deadly reality: when it is scorching outside, you have been on a ridge line for half the day and don't look to get off till around dusk, you are out of water and can feel dehydration setting in- that's real. But how much of it is honestly "Real Life"? How much of it is "The Real World" as my coworker used to describe it? Yesterday i found myself in the mall, the wonderful world of superfluous business, thinking the same thoughts: "This is so bizarrely plastic!" Orange Julius, though delicious, is not necessary for life- or even happiness. GAP and Hollister, FYE and Brookstone.... these are not the stuff of life... One day Hot Topic will close it's gothic security gate forever, Maui Nix will load it's surfboards and flip flops into a truck and haul them away, Candy World... OK Candy World may last forever. But, you get my drift- the things that we think are "Real" the styles and trends, the flavor of the moment... They are all temporary.

But a lot of things are temporary that we think are permanent: working for a paycheck, taxes, our homes, our cars, our careers or problems. One day it all comes to an end. There is a Middle Eastern legend that says a powerful ruler commissioned his wise men to gather all the knowledge and wisdom of the world into a single book. They worked feverishly on the book and presented it to him. "It is too large, condense it," he commanded them. They worked hard brought an even shorter version to him. It was still too long for their ruler, who commanded them again to shorten it. Again they did, again it was too long. Finally they abbreviated it into a single sentence, all the knowledge of the ages, all the wisdom, and they presented to to him. He unrolled the scroll and read these words "This too shall pass."

All of "this" shall pass, but once, long ago, a man had an encounter with creator God. He asked God for a name to call Him by. God's reply was, "I AM". Sometimes God says the strangest things. But He is. We don't always like to think of it, but HE is the ultimate reality. The Hebrew word is rich in meaning, it means to be,

to exist,

to happen,

to take place,

to be established,

to continue,

to be at,

to come to pass.

This man, Moses, asked God for a name, and God answered him with a verb.

"Nice to meet you, my name is Matt, what's your name?"

"Running, nice to meet you Matt."

It's a bit jarring really. But it brings us to the point of the matter- The ultimate reality is God. R.C. Sproul- a theologian, once lay out an argument for the Existence of a creator by saying- If there wasn't something that always was, there would still be nothing. It has been an argument that i have not been able to shake.

Ultimately, the realist things we experience in life are temporary: God is a permanent fixture in the universe, well to be more precise the universe in a fixture to the permanent God. So if He is the realist thing we can ever encounter, then why is it that all the other "stuff" seems to be so much more important to us?