Real Families

When we stopped for breakfast, I realized my wallet was missing. We were on our way back to northern Indiana after a week at the beach in the southern United States. The trip had gone smoothly—no car trouble, no illness (maybe a little sunburn), no meltdowns. This was an extended family vacation that included four teenagers, one young adult and three middle aged folks; we had a wonderful time of enjoying one another and the beauty of creation.

We did about half the drive and stopped for the night somewhere in Tennessee—planning to get up early the next morning and finish the trip. By 6 a.m. we were on the road, stopping before an hour had passed to get gas. We planned to have breakfast later in the morning when the kids woke up. While Art filled the gas tank, I went across the street to McDonald’s to get coffee. Sufficiently fueled and caffeinated, we were on our way.

About three hours later we stopped for breakfast, and I realized I didn’t have my wallet. My best guess was that I left it in the restroom of the McDonald’s in—what was that town we were in, anyway? Peering at the Atlas, we made our best guess as to where we were when we stopped for gas that morning.

I called the McDonald’s customer service 800 number. I waded my way through a number of prompts that asked me if I was calling to complain about service, give a compliment about service, or offer services of my own to the McDonald’s corporation. I finally got a person who was sympathetic to my plight and tried to help me by giving a couple of phone numbers for McDonald’s restaurants found along I-75 in Tennessee; they didn’t pan out. There are thousands of McDonald’s, many of them along I-75 in Tennessee.

In the meantime, I also called my bank and credit card company and talked to very nice people who canceled my cards after verifying my identification. Eventually we realized that as long as we were calling credit card companies, we could try to find out if records were made of purchases immediately—perhaps this way we could find out in what town I used a credit card to make the gas purchase. So one more phone call; one more nice person at the end of the line. We got the name of the town, got a list of all the McDonald’s in the town. The next number I called was paydirt—they had my wallet.

All of this took place on a Sunday morning. We were driving through the beautiful Smokey Mountains on the way back from a trip that allowed us to relax, recharge and renew our connections with one another. “Getting away” is not the only way to achieve such a phenomenon, but it makes it easier. It also is a reminder of the need to tend to connections when not away—when in the midst of regular, day-to-day life.

But on the way home from our vacation there was a different insight for me. Driving through those mountains that morning, I was trying to solve a problem caused by my own negligence. I was getting frustrated and anxious. I was close to undoing all the relaxing I had experienced over the previous seven days.

That morning, I talked to at least seven people in cubicles and offices across the country who were pulling a Sunday morning shift on their jobs. I don’t know whether they loved their jobs or they hated them. I don’t know what kind of lives they lead or what they look like, where they live, what their own families are like. They helped me deal with my foolish little problem without making me feel foolish. Maybe it’s silly, but for those moments on the phone, they became part of my community. Yes, I could say that it is part of their training as customer service representatives and that it is their job to be nice to me and help me out—nothing more, nothing less.

But this is not just about my wallet. I often think about this big, wide world with 6 billion other people in it. How do I walk in it? Do I take care to make people feel at ease, to not make them feel foolish even though I may never see them again? Do I take the time to make each encounter—no matter how minute—one that honors the humanity of every person with whom I come in contact?

Most of the time we are oblivious to most of the people who share the planet with us. Our most intimate encounters are with a small number of people: our families, our neighbors, our congregations.

This is a good thing. But maybe it would serve us well to also be mindful of the big picture and not just when it serves our needs. In our “regular, day-to-day lives,” might we also pause to remember those connections that may never be visible to us, to pray for those we may never meet or see—or otherwise even think about. We might even build a path to a more peaceful world.