I like Subway because I always leave that place with a story to tell. A millisecond before I stepped into the area, a middle-aged woman weaved in front of me. She carried a phone in her right hand and an attitude in the wrinkles of her forehead. She began telling the worker what she wanted on her three (oh yes, three) foot long sandywitches. When she learned they were out of tomatoes, she insisted on waiting until the worker ran into Wal-Mart to restock, for it was "impossible," she informed me, to eat her regulars without tomatoes. Although slightly angry, my hunger got the best of me, so I waited for the man to return.
While patience was grinding her perfect work within, I playfully eavesdropped on a conversation between two older women. They had the perfect formula for being evangelical Pentecostals = Blue jean shirt + Tennis shoes +Pinned-up hair dos. As I listened, one was telling the other about a movie she had recently seen. I didn't catch the gist of the movie- but it had to do with a governmental spy couple. Apparently, the man in the movie had been captured and kept from his lover for a long time.
The woman continued her narrative about the film, finally concluding in an aroused voice, "But at the end, the man bust up in the woman's house and said 'For all this time, you were the one I have always loved!' Ah!"
She finished this line of the movie and began to cry. They were not dramatic tears. She simply cried silently, while taking a pause for air.
It seemed frivolous at first, but I began to wonder why she cried- in public for all to see, over an unrealistic movie.
That connection she felt overwhelmed her. A connection that was stronger than the social norm of "not crying in public." Selflessly sobbing over something she saw as beautiful. She felt attached to the essence of that one scene. Maybe she realized the beauty of love, grace and life that comes from the true reconciliation of this broken humanity. To her, that scene could have given her hope that love is possible, fervent and moving.
I am pretty sure the cause of her tears was not a desperate cry for "a man" in her life. She experienced something much greater than her desires and wants. At that moment, she experience that electromagnetic spark that people experience when engaging with one another.
Deeper than any feeling, deeper than this naturalistic earth- this spark is a touch of the divine, weaved into the very fabric of our humanity. Tying us together one by one, group by group, race by race, from glory to glory.
Every tear in her eye, in the back of a dingy Subway restaurant in a rough part of Jackson, was a beautiful thing.
And that is the spark, selfless and unadulterated, that I seek.
