Most of my time at Pizza Hut was spent in the kitchen cooking, but I got out into the front of the house occasionally to serve as a waiter. My training as a waiter was modest, but I knew better than to worry about whether a customer’s glass was half full or half empty. My job was to keep the glass full.
A family came in to eat after the lunch rush and grandmother was drinking coffee with her meal. When I saw that her cup was half empty, I unobtrusively topped it off with fresh coffee as I moved around the table. She looked at me sadly when she discovered the full cup and sighed, “It had just gotten to the right temperature. Now I have to wait for it to cool again.”
I learned about asking permission to refill coffee cups on the job and not during training.
Training is a good thing and we all need it, but training can’t teach us everything we need to know. There is no substitute for experience and experience can be painful. It has been 34 years since that grandmother looked at me over her coffee cup and I still remember her sad words.
If that grandmother had been angry with me, I might have forgotten her by now, but she wasn’t angry. She was sad about my mistake. She didn’t ask me to fix the problem I had created. She assumed that burden herself.
I thought about that grandmother today when I read what God did after Adam and Eve disobeyed his command not to eat fruit from the tree which gives knowledge of good and evil. The eating of which left them ashamed that they were naked.
And the LORD God made clothes out of animal skins for Adam and his wife, and he clothed them (Genesis 3:21).
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