Several months ago I was standing in line at a Taco Bell at lunchtime. It was extremely busy and for whatever reason there was only one girl at the register. She was very young and it was seemed clear that she was either in training still or just recently completed training. She was clearly nervous and the line was growing longer by the moment.
I was second to the front of the line when she completed ringing up the man in front of me without inputting into the computer the amount of money he gave her. She thought she was done when the customer asked her for his change. She quickly realized what she had done. Not a big deal in reality but what it now required was that she count out his change in her head. Simple arithmetic I know she was capable of but all of the sudden she froze. She turned bright red. She looked down into the open till and I could see that she was trying to remember exactly how much money the customer had given her. She cautiously reached for the quarters and drew a few out, the whole time I could see she was trying to do the math in her head, counting pennies up to nickels and nickels to dimes.
The line was growing longer. The man was looking over the register at what she was doing which I could tell was making her more nervous. Frustrated he commented to her that she did not have the right amount of change in her hand. I could tell he just wanted to reach over the counter and do what seemed to him an easy task. She put all the change back and was trying to count again. “No I gave you a ten!” Said the man. She became redder and was now starting to hold back tears. I am sure she just wanted to go crawl into a hole somewhere, wanted to run away but, like most circumstances in life like that, she could not. I could tell she wanted to give up, to walk away, to leave this job, which was probably her first, and be with a friend or someone who understood.
Standing there watching her, a girl who I did not know, I had a unique experience. I felt for her a deep sense of empathy and love. It caught me off guard and I almost started to cry for her. I wanted to tell her that it was going to be okay and that I had been in an almost identical situation in my very first job.
More customers were getting impatient and there didn’t seem to be a manager in sight. I said a quick prayer in my heart and asked Heavenly Father to help her to calm down and to feel His comfort. With little evidence to back my feelings I believe he did answer my, and perhaps her, prayers. The situation did not go away. The customer was there and needed his change, which he soon got. The pressures of other customers did not go away either; A long line remained. But she got through it. Soon a manager showed up and opened another till.
All in all it was a simple mistake at a Taco Bell, nothing, seemingly significant here. And yet, there was a person, a soul, who was having a rough day. And she needed comfort. It often strikes me, and I fall victim to, the school of thought that the Lord doesn’t or shouldn’t care about such small things. Why should the God of Heaven and Earth be concerned with an incident such as this? If it is important to us, no matter how trivial, I believe it is important to him. He is there for us and cares about all we go through. I believe that and I felt it unexpectedly while getting lunch on a random weekday.
