Thoughts from the Waiting Room

I spent parts of yesterday in three different waiting rooms: auto repair shop, insurance office, and the Department of Motor Vehicles. It seems that many people have given some thought to making waiting rooms accommodating and pleasant. I normally carry a book with me to pass the time, but without one, I had plenty of time to study the surroundings.

The most comfortable and aesthetically pleasing was the insurance office. A couple of displays provided me with some knowledge of that company's history and some of the sort of trivia I enjoy knowing (a 1925 Cadillac retailed at $3100, but careful buyers could get one as low as $1450). The only magazine offerings were People and Rachel Ray. I opted for food and read several delicious-sounding recipes from Rachel.

The most technologically advanced room was the DMV. There, a flat screen on nearly every wall offers a running menu of news headlines, safety tips, health warnings, and celebrity gossip. Each item stays on the screen about ten seconds, which matches most people's attention span, I suppose. There were no print offerings to read, but I did see one man reading his well-worn Bible.

In the tiny auto shop waiting room was a collection of toy cars, a television tuned to an inspirational station, and a rack full of gospel tracts (twelve titles to choose from). The room was tiny and not particularly comfortable, but the people behind the counter all had smiles, and there was pleasant conversation.

These waiting areas tell me that Americans are a mixed bag. We are interested in things glittery, carnal, and transitory, but feel obligated to pay attention to temporal welfare concerns and current events(even though I'm sure most of the people staring at the screen in the DMV could not locate the countries in the news clips on a globe). Most of us are afraid of offending by putting out reading matter that would appear to be sectarian, and we all ascribe enormous authority (with implied wisdom) to the state. Some of us would be horrified to see a Bible verse intermingled with the Tiger Woods and Tyra Banks stories, but no one seems to mind seeing gospel tracts in a humble room on a back street in the dirty part of town. And, apparently, very few are expected to do serious reading or thinking.

Those of us who have seen the light of the gospel need to ask ourselves how we are to speak redemptively into the marketplaces of our world. The marketplace reveals the lost and mindless condition of our world.

And thank God for Christian mechanics like Dave Williams!