The Waitress and the Gospel
My wife Jan and I landed in Philadelphia on a rainy Tuesday with optimism in our bones. Jan had a new novel out, a quiet, aching story about a woman named Flo, trying to hold together the pieces of herself after her daughter commits a serious crime.
Jan’s book was about identity and consequence, the failures of parenting, and the hope, faint but stubborn, for redemption. We were here to see how Jan’s book landed with readers. Ahead of us: a week of appearances at bookstores to attract a new audience. A meeting with a book club whose members had already read Jan’s novel and wanted to learn more, straight from the author.
But before all that: a dinner out with Jan’s publisher at a place called Little Pete’s, tucked near her publisher’s townhouse a few blocks from the Philadelphia Art Museum. You didn’t need a sign to know where you were. You could smell it — the fryers, the burnt coffee, the stubborn residue of grease and time. No décor to speak of. Just lightbulbs trying their best. Vinyl booths that had seen things. A menu that looked like five countries got drunk and opened a diner together. Monte Cristos, spinach and strawberries, tzatziki, shrimp salad, matzo ball soup. All of it there, laminated and loud. A place for people who knew what they wanted or didn’t care anymore.
Across the way, a woman with a walker moved fork to mouth with careful grace. Two young men with dreadlocks laughed over fries and too much ketchup. At the bar, what appeared to be regulars sat easy and familiar, hands cradling bottles and glasses. And there was us. Taking it all in.
Our waitress moved with a kind of practiced ease, like someone used to carrying other people’s troubles and her own. Her frame was sturdy, grounded. Not polished or styled, but vivid — like a blues singer who’s seen both the long nights and the sunrise after. She had a gap-toothed grin, ink on her arms, and a simple wooden cross that rested low on her chest. She said her name was Tina Marie.
“Tina Marie,” I said, smiling. “Like the name of the Motown singer.”
She grinned wider.
I noticed the tattoos on her forearms — names, maybe, in looping script — and I asked her what they meant. “My husband,” she said. “First name on this wrist. Middle name here. His last name’s on the back of my neck.”
I complimented her on her cross.
Then her story came tumbling out, one thought chasing the next with barely a breath in between. She told us about she and her husband living out of a car in the desert near Bakersfield, California. About drug addictions. Addictions to other people and their intimacies. Then getting clean. Then waking up to visions to go east, first to Las Vegas and then to Philadelphia.
“We just go where we’re called,” she said. “We don’t always understand it. But we go because we follow God.”
Her voice had that electric rhythm — the kind people get when they’re filled with something they can’t name. She spoke of Christian faith not like a doctrine but like a surge of power. Something you move through. Something that moves through you. The Holy Spirit.
As she talked, I felt something in me flicker — old wiring lighting up again. I remembered myself in college, reaching for comfort in scripture. I was dealing with trauma back then, trying to stay alive in a world that felt cracked and uneven. Prayer was part of my tool kit in survival mode, and so were scripture and books.
To stay alive, I also built emotional walls. I kept things out. I kept people out. And into that space, other gods came who spoke through their art, like Jim Morrison, long gone from this earth when I discovered him. His voice, his fire, his descent into the mystic — his lyrics began to hold me together more than scripture or prayer did.
Compared to Jim Morrison, the Bible felt ancient. Morrison’s words felt immediate, alive. Music spoke to something raw and broken in me with the same urgency and emotional pull that the Holy Spirit now seemed to speak to Tina Marie. It wasn’t that I chased after God and failed to find Him. It was that something else arrived instead. Words and music from ghosts, louder, closer, and more comforting than church pews and study groups.
After college, I learned how to let others in again — most significantly, Jan. I also found traditional worship, through Scripture and church attendance, meaningful again, alongside music, for reasons I cannot quite pinpoint. During the first years of our marriage, it felt like God had reclaimed a place in my heart. I taught confirmation class to junior high kids at the church where we got married. There was something comforting about it. Teaching drew me to the spiritual ideal of parenting as a kind of love that reflects God’s love for humanity.
We had a child. We went to church as a family. I taught our son in confirmation class, too. It felt real then. Steady.
But a child grows up and leaves the home. My church attendance became spottier. When COVID hit, participating in church services online made things easier, but also lonelier. I listened to the congregation’s fears and worries through a screen, and something in me began to drift. When the doors opened again, I never went back.
The language Tina Marie spoke, the cadence of spirit and calling, once familiar, now sounded like something from a former life in a way, but still part of me.
“Have you ever read The Wonderful Spirit-Filled Life?” I impulsively asked Tina. This was a book that had once sustained me decades ago. Tina Marie’s belief in the power of the Holy Spirit made me think of it.
She paused. “Yes,” she said. “I have. I know it.”
We nodded, as if to say — yes, that path. That one.
She told me she felt safe with us. That’s why she’d shared so much. Something about the table, or maybe the way we listened. She smiled again, then floated off to another booth like someone on a mission.
I left a tip that felt too small and too much at the same time. Like I was trying to put a price on trust. But also because I didn’t know what else to do with the gratitude for Tina sharing something about herself and reminding me about a part of my identity I had not thought of for a while.
Throughout the week, amid book readings and more dinners, I remembered her presence, her stories, the faith she carried like a flame cupped in both hands. I wondered what would become of her. Whether the world would catch her up when it got hard again. Whether the visions would keep showing up.
A few days later, Jan and I sat in a convent, of all places, where the book club met. The air in the room was tempered and reverent, as if something sacred, though not spoken of as such, had transpired and now lingered in the seams of the carpet and the folds of the curtain. Light slanted through the stained glass in shards of blue and green, casting the gathered readers in a kind of cathedral hush, though no one acted hushed.
Jan read from her novel. She was animated. No, electric. She leaned in with her whole torso, as if the only way to meet the words people offered was to enter their gravitational field. The men and women in the room began to ask questions and share what Jan’s novel meant to them. One man in his 80s said Jan’s novel made him return to fiction reading after a long hiatus. The voices in the room were urgent as they discussed the themes of loss and return. What gets shut behind a door. What waits on the other side.
One woman said the book reached spoke to a trauma she hadn’t named in years. The main character, Flo, carries her own grief alongside the crime of her daughter. The woman didn’t spell out what she’d lived through. She didn’t need to. You could hear it in the spaces between her words.
The book club members talked about Flo’s lack of faith. Her spiritual drift. And I found myself speaking again, without plan. I mentioned the book of John. How Jesus says no one comes to the Father unless the Father draws them. Maybe Flo was being drawn by faith.
Maybe all of us are drawn by faith, and don’t know it yet. Maybe I had stopped looking for God, but He kept showing up, anyway. Through a waitress with tattoos. Through Jim Morrison’s words, piercing me like Jan’s art connecting with readers gathered in a room. Just because I stopped looking for God in the obvious places like scripture, God never stopped looking for me.
Maybe all of us are drawn by faith, and don’t know it yet. Maybe I had stopped looking for God, but He kept showing up, anyway. In a waitress with tattoos. In a room full of readers sharing their wounds and their joys. Through my wife and her art that brought us to these places. Perhaps God was reaching out all this time even through mad things like Jim Morrison and his tormented words, just like Jan’s art was speaking to the woman who talked with Jan for several minutes after the reading was over, clearly looking for solace in Jan’s words. Through the years of parenting, too — in trying to love well, in the everyday rituals that once felt holy. Perhaps God draws us closer during those moments when we think God is most distant, but we don’t notice. Not always where we think to look. But there all this time.
Photo by Hans Vivek on Unsplash
