THE CHURCH LADIES AND THE WAITRESS

What we think we know may not be the story at all.  There were two “church ladies” who were upstanding members of the local church, very devout women or so they claimed.  Anyhow there was a waitress these ladies had become vaguely acquainted with that they knew worked hard and sent her children to Sunday school, they didn’t have the best clothes but they were neat and clean.  The waitress didn’t get to go to church herself because she had to work and when she wasn’t working she was home caring for her family, their home and preparing for the new baby to be born in just a couple of months. 

She didn’t wear a wedding ring because she had gained too much weight.  She was married and her husband was serving in Iraq.  However, the “church ladies” didn’t know this and they quickly came to other conclusions.  He’d only been there a few months but she was praying he could be home when their new baby was born.  She missed him and their three sons missed their father and it was hard being alone.  Because there wasn’t much money they lived in perhaps less than desirable circumstances in not the best of neighborhoods but she believed in God, in Jesus and God must have His reasons and she had her faith.  God would see them through and someday soon they would all be together as a family again and until them she would pray and believe and do what she had to do.  Even though things were not all she hoped for her and her children right now and life was often a struggle from paycheck to paycheck she at least had family nearby and a Lord and savior always with her.  She told her husband they would be all right and prayed he would be safe and home soon. 

These “church ladies” frequented the diner where this young waitress worked and they had made note of her and her obvious condition and made assumptions that were not true…she was “poor white trash,” must be so considering where she lived and they had seen her with her children at a soup kitchen one day when they were dropping off donations from their church and one of the “church ladies” had seen her go into the good will store and here that girl was having another kid on the taxpayer’s dollar, so they thought and so they told others.  It was easy to assume.  “Well, at least she worked, such as the job was, but those poor kids, probably didn’t even know who their father was.”  They’d heard about her kind, unmarried with a bunch of kids living hand to mouth.  “It is no way to raise children.  It’s poor kids like that that grow up to be felons and get in all manner of trouble, cause trouble for others; so gossiped the two “church ladies.”