The Waffle House Relief Person

Last year, I was diagnosed with colon cancer.

That’s still a strange sentence to write. What started as a routine colonoscopy turned into multiple procedures, a cancer diagnosis, and eventually surgery to remove part of my colon. Thankfully, the cancer was caught early, and as far as I know, I’m cancer-free today.

In the grand scheme of cancer stories, mine is a pretty good one. I had a few months of uncertainty, some pretty uncomfortable procedures (three colonoscopies in three months will give you a new appreciation for what your colon does), and a surgery that has certainly helped me feel my age. But ultimately, I got good news. I’m alive, and life has mostly returned to normal.

But something changes when you hear the word cancer associated with your own body. Even when everything turns out okay, there’s a part of you that doesn’t quite go back to the way things were. For me, it was months after my surgery. It’s like that scene in Saving Private Ryan when they storm the beach, bombs and bullets everywhere, then time slows and there is a ringing in your ear. You know you need to keep moving, but you are sort of frozen with the reality of death.

Last week, I reached out to a friend of mine named Marcus. Marcus gives drum lessons, and my thirteen-year-old son, being a thirteen-year-old boy, has decided that to play music he must also hit something.

Marcus and I have worked together in video production for years. Marcus is what I would call a “scene kid.” He loves metal music and art, and he’s covered in tattoos. The type of person your mom told you to avoid in middle school, but once you talk to him, you realize he’s one of the most loving and gracious people you’ll meet.

It was going to be a pretty simple text asking about drum lessons.

Instead, Marcus responded with some pretty frightening news.

The day before, he had woken up with a lump in his neck. After seeing a doctor, he was told it could be a tumor, possibly cancer, in his lungs. A biopsy was scheduled, and he was suddenly facing the same kind of uncertainty I had experienced the year before, only much scarier.

He knew about my cancer experience and asked if I’d be willing to get together and talk.

Of course, I said yes.

So we met at Waffle House.

Jeffrey Clayton, Courtesy of Unsplash.

I suppose some of you reading this would assume there are better places than Waffle House to talk about cancer, death, and the meaning of life, but as a person raised in the South, I can tell you there is not.

Marcus had a lot of questions, particularly about the emotional side of things. Was I scared? How did I handle the possibility that something could happen to me? And finally, did I blame God or ask “Why me?”

Neither of us was particularly interested in blaming God. But that didn’t mean we weren’t scared, confused, or frustrated.

I told Marcus that I don’t believe God gave me cancer to teach me some kind of lesson. And I certainly don’t believe God might be giving him cancer to bring him closer to Jesus. I’ve never found much comfort in that idea. What I do find comfort in is the idea of God as the Hound of Heaven.

A God who is constantly pursuing us. A God whose love doesn’t depend on how faithful we are or how well we handle the terrible things that happen to us. I don’t believe God causes these things to force us into faithfulness. I believe he’s faithful to us through them, even when we are struggling to be faithful ourselves. And sitting across from Marcus, I realized that was something I needed to hear just as much as he did.

I lost my father to Alzheimer’s disease. I went through a cancer diagnosis and surgery. And perhaps one of the more confusing losses in my life was watching a church plant I had spent ten years helping build come to an end, and watching the church we merged with slowly move me out of leadership until I was eventually left “church homeless.”

For a long time, church ministry was a significant part of who I was. I loved teaching people about the grace and mercy of Jesus. And then, for a variety of reasons, that part of my life was gone. I didn’t stop believing in Jesus. But I began to feel disconnected from the idea that God was using me. I wasn’t a pastor. I wasn’t leading a church or worship each week, and I didn’t have to clean my house weekly for our community group. Somewhere along the way, I started believing that I wasn’t really doing much for the kingdom of God anymore. Either too old or not good enough was what I believed.

But here I was, sitting in a Waffle House, talking about the grace and mercy of Jesus with a friend scared for himself and his family. There was no sermon to prepare. No ministry to organize. It was just two friends talking about the things we were afraid of and reminding each other that God still loved us. And for the first time in a while, I felt like maybe God wasn’t finished using me after all.

But the story doesn’t really end there.

This alone would be a good story to tell about how God is still using me and how he never left and blah blah blah. But just as I was placing myself at the center of the universe … again … God wasn’t done working in the back booth of the Waffle House.

As we prepared to leave, Marcus mentioned that he often came here with his wife and three-year-old daughter. He somewhat knew our waiter, Carolyn, a kind woman in her early 60s who was sweet to his daughter. But this visit he noticed something new. She had a John 3:16 necklace on.

So, with his biopsy still ahead of him, Marcus did something that I didn’t think to do or wouldn’t have been too comfortable doing. He asked Carolyn if she would be willing to pray with us.

Praying with a waiter was something my Southern Baptist pastor father often did. I was always embarrassed by it, but it typically resulted in a profound spiritual moment.

Carolyn immediately said yes. She sat next to me and Marcus and said, “I like to hold hands.” We held hands, and then something happened that my traditional churchy mind didn’t expect. Carolyn started praying. Not Marcus, not me. Carolyn. She prayed a prayer unlike what I would have prayed. She spoke to God as if she was speaking to one of us. It was powerful and kind. It was full of empathy for all three of us, calling on a God of mercy and healing, as if she knew he would hear her and respond. It was a prayer without the trappings of traditional church, as if David himself were crying out to God with us. And in the end, she reminded us of a very simple thing, that God loves us, and he knows we love him too, even when we don’t show it.

I don’t know exactly why those words hit me the way they did, but they did.

Maybe because we spend so much of our lives trying to prove something to God. Trying to be better Christians, better fathers, better husbands, better people. And when life starts falling apart, it’s easy to wonder if God is somehow disappointed in us.

But Carolyn didn’t tell us we needed to do better. She didn’t tell us we needed to have more faith or pray harder. She just reminded us that we were loved. And that was enough.

When we finished praying, I looked down at Carolyn’s name tag. Underneath her name were two words:

Relief Person.

Of course this was her job title, but to me, it was so much more. It was the true title of a quiet, hidden missionary at the Waffle House. Here we were, two guys talking about cancer and death, and the person who had just prayed for us was literally called a relief person.

That’s when Carolyn told us her story.

Her brother had been murdered in a situation involving domestic abuse just a few years ago. She had never really wanted to work at Waffle House. But her brother had worked there, and after his death, she felt drawn to come work at the same place.

She became a relief person.

Carolyn understood she was just working at Waffle House. But she also understood that she had an opportunity every day to show people the love, kindness, and grace of Jesus.

Carolyn knew what grief looked like. She knew what it was like when life didn’t make sense and couldn’t be fixed. And yet, here she was, comforting two people struggling with their own fears.

She didn’t have all the answers. She couldn’t guarantee that Marcus was going to be okay. She could only offer what she had. Kindness. Prayer. Love. Grace. And somehow, that was exactly what we needed.

For years, I associated ministry with the church because it had been such a big part of my life. When that part of my life ended, I felt like something important had ended with it. But I think God was reminding me of something that morning. He doesn’t need me to have a ministry title to use me. He doesn’t need Carolyn to be a pastor or a missionary to a distant country to use her. And he doesn’t need Marcus to have everything figured out before he can use him, either.

Three unique people, three unique stories, all acting as a ministry of mercy to one another. God’s hands and feet, moving in harmony through three very different people. The mystery of mercy in action.

I had gone through cancer, and now I was able to sit with a friend who was afraid he might have it too. Carolyn had experienced the terrible loss of her brother, and now she was offering comfort to two strangers. And Marcus, probably the most frightened person at that table, had unknowingly reminded me that God could still use me to share the gospel, even without a church.

We were all bringing a little bit of relief to one another.

We want grace to mean that everything works out. That the biopsy comes back negative. That the surgery is successful. That our loved ones get better, and peace triumphs over violence. That our churches don’t fall apart. That the things we’ve lost somehow get returned to us. And when those things don’t happen, we start wondering where God went.

But what if grace isn’t always found in the resolution? What if sometimes grace is simply found in the middle of the suffering? A friend willing to listen. A woman willing to pray. A reminder that we are loved, even when we’re scared, doubtful, confused, or struggling to believe it ourselves.

The Hound of Heaven, chasing us and cornering us into that booth of the Waffle House.

I still don’t know what Marcus’ biopsy will reveal or what his family will face in the coming weeks. And I certainly don’t know what suffering might be waiting for any of us around the corner. What I can tell him, what I can tell me, is that we are loved. And that love is not going anywhere, regardless of what happens next.

Carolyn didn’t cure anyone that morning. She hadn’t changed Marcus’ diagnosis. She hadn’t given us answers. But she had reminded us that Jesus loved us. And in that moment, Carolyn brought relief. Relief to Carolyn that she wasn’t just a random worker at Waffle House, relief to me that God wasn’t and isn’t done, and relief to Marcus that He will not leave or abandon him.

I went to Waffle House worried how on earth I was going to help my friend. Instead, I discovered that God had sent a relief person for all of us.