Wednesday Night Stories: McDonald's

If you want to mess up your life, move to a foreign country (preferably non-English speaking). You will learn incredible amounts of things about yourself. About your ingrained cultural expectations (apparently, I love efficiency), about your emotions (apparently, I am capable of anger), and about your breaking points.

Those breaking points were a repeated theme of my life in East Asia and they worked cyclically. The general pattern was: discontent, ignore it!, anxiety, believe lies, more discontent, worry, crash (with varying degrees of ugliness), restoration.

And after living through this I knew the best way to get to the end was the bring on the crash landing and ask Jesus the knock me out of the sky. So, I had been feeling this way in late April and decided I needed to deal with it one night.

Except I didn't decide this until 2 AM.

But I really, really wanted to deal with it that night. So I went to the only non-questionable place open at those hours. A place that can be found in 119 countries and serves 58 million customers a day. Good old McDonald's.

A foreigner walking down the street in our major, international city didn't tend to draw much attention. However, a somewhat distraught foreigner walking down the road at 2:30 in the morning does draw attention.

But, I arrived, ordered up some coffee and sat down for what I expected to be awhile, opening my journal entry with the lines, "I need to be smacked down. Jesus, I need you to confront me and smack me down."

I'll spare you the details of the journal entry, let's just say, I'm a big proponent of being real with God and when I do that, the language often gets "coarse". But my basic issue was feeling like an abject, utter failure, because my ministry there wasn't yielding "any results" and I felt like I wasn't doing my job.

So, this process of fighting it out was actually going pretty well. I was frantically scribbling, probably making a lot of interesting facial expressions, and sipping on my coffee, while all around me, locals were making the 24 hour McDonald's their last stop after a night on the town. I stood out. But, I had headphones on and took no notice.

After 90 minutes of this, I got a very distinct feeling that I'm sure you're familiar with. The feeling of someone standing in very close proximity to you. So, I looked up and literally leaning over me was an East Asian man. He was literally 4 inches from my shoulder. He looked very interested in what this white man was doing in McDonald's at 4 AM.

So, I took out one of my headphones. Curtly said, "Hello." to him in East Asian (and not a syllable more), put my headphone back in and looked down again.

But the lurking feeling remained.

And I looked up again to see he had sat down across from me.

Seriously?

What?

And then he spoke, a sentence I'm sure he'd spent the last few minutes crafting from a limited English vocabulary, "Why . . . are . . . you . . . here?"

I perfectly legitimate question.

An absolutely legitimate question.

Why is there a foreigner at McDonald's at 4 in the morning? What is he doing? How many cups of coffee has he had? Do you think he looks more like Harry Potter or Bill Gates? Why is he here?

At this point, I had been "studying" the language for several months, but I still had the vocabulary of a 3 year old and certainly not the ability to say, "I'm in the midst of an existential crisis, perplexed about my very purpose and value on the Earth."

Not so much.

So, when confronted with the question, "Why are you here?", I exhaled and pulled out a sheet of paper. The paper was a written (East Asian) explanation of the Gospel. A brief message about the Good News of Jesus Christ. That God loves mankind, that we are separated from Him, but that He has come into the world to rescue and restore us and we can know, and live for, and walk with Him.

I handed him the paper and said (in East Asian), "I believe this . . . but maybe I don't believe this."

He took the paper and immediately started reading it. Quite attentively.

As he did this, I noticed two things. First, I had already pretty much exhausted my language skills on that previous sentence and seeing how carefully he was reading the message, I was pretty sure he was about the ask me a question, and even if I somehow understood his question, what were the chances that I'd be able to provide a cogent answer at 4 AM in a language at which my skills were awful?

Second, and I wrote this in my journal as he was reading. I had come to this McDonald's in large part because I was upset about my lack of success and skills and control in sharing the Gospel with these people. And here in front of me, the Gospel was being shared and I wasn't doing a thing. I was sitting there. Watching. God was doing all the work in sharing the Gospel with this man. I wrote:

"What an amazing illustration is going on here right now.

This is how much control I have over every conversation about the Gospel. This is just as much about me as if I were explaining everything perfectly.

Thank you Jesus."

And sure enough, he did ask me a question. And somehow (it's called the Holy Spirit, folks) I not only understood him, but I answered and the answer was sufficient to make him nod his head and move on.

And after a few more minutes of conversation, he stood up and headed out. And I went back to my frantic journaling with a new perspective on "doing my job" and my role in that whole picture.

So when I left around 6:00 AM, my walk back through alleys and corridors in a city 18 million to a smoggy sunrise was immeasurably more peaceful than my walk to the Golden Arches.