“Excuse me, can I just say something?”
I turned from the vulnerable conversation I was having with a new friend and looked up at a middle-aged woman’s face. She’d been sitting two tables beside us, eating dinner with her teenage son. Upon rising from her completed meal of Panda Express goodness, she stepped over and interrupted my entire conversation.
“I just want to encourage y’all to keep going,” she said. “As a mom, it’s so encouraging to see two young men pursuing God like you two are. Keep going. He’s worth it.” Then turning to me explicitly, she said, “You are loved, you are worthy, you are valuable and precious.”
I turned red at the woman’s words — not for embarrassment, but for sheer unspeakable joy. I was touched beyond measure. Moved that some random mom in a delicious fast food restaurant would take such initiative to approach me and tell me I am loved when my own mother is over two thousand miles away and unable to do so face-to-face.
Sophia, her name was.
Her interrupting my meal was just another confirmation that this journey called life, difficult and prone to struggle though it certainly is, has an altogether redeeming end. Of all the people in all the places, Sophia reminded me at Panda Express what’s so easy to forget even at church:
That even when I feel worthless, I am worthy. Not because I deserve such standing or could have possibly earned it, but simply because that’s who God is. A God of grace unending and second chances unlimited. A God who restores worth to the worthless and love to the loveless.
After Sophia and her son left, my friend and I continued our vulnerable conversation in a fast food restaurant full of people undoubtedly catching words here and there.
I only hope our conversation was as uplifting for them as it was for us. And apparently for Sophia.
Has someone ever rudely interrupted your meal to tell you that you’re loved?
“You are loved, you are worthy, you are valuable and precious.”
what a kind beautiful soul