| John Lithgow as Dick Solomon |
Every workplace has certain people who just get on our nerves.
We assume, much of the time, that people can make us mad, when in truth, if we are established in our righteousness before God (Isaiah 54: 14), then no weapon can prosper against or tongue rail against us (Isaiah 54: 17).
Yet in our minds, in our bodies, sometimes there will still be the stress of people we just do not like.
| Mean Lunch Lady — A Picture of Our Adversary |
For most people, the biggest challenge is the distraught secretary, one pushed to the edge so many times that she has grown accustomed to snapping at everyone. Then there's the Lunch Lady.
The Lunch Lady, or server, is usually some gruff and stuffy lady who is down on her luck, frustrated with her lot in life, and her only interest is heckling people that she "does not like."
I remember one scene from the hit sitcom "Third Rock From the Sun" starring John Lithgow as an alien disguised as a professor name Dick Solomon. He was living in Ohio with his three attending alien-space retinue, Tommy, Harry, and Sally. The show ran for five years, a great plot, set-up with the aliens in human bodies trying to make sense of the weird and wacky world of human beings.
Among the many challenges that this same professor, Dick Solomon, faced, there was the unique upset he dealt with when he confronted a fussy lunch lady at the university cafeteria. She was a squat, unhappy woman who would let everyone else get free crackers with their meal, but for Dick, she would charge him $. 25 cents.
At first, Dick obliged. The next time, he asked why he had to pay money while everyone else got something for free. She simply told him to pay up. The next few days, he realized that the lunch was targeting him. He did not know what to do.
First, he just walked up to her, asking why she was treating him so unfairly: "I just don't like you," was her answer, then she gave off a snide smile.
He tried smiling back, placating her, which did not work. He then brought her flowers, but that did not work either. Distraught, he started to cry in his office. Then his sweetheart Mary Albright walked in and asked him what was wrong.. When he cried about how the Lunch Lady was so mean to him, picking on him to pay for crackers when everyone else would get them for free.
Do you have someone like that in your workplace? In your home? Perhaps a nosy neighbor down the street? If you are a believer, you have such an Adversary — Satan — and his messengers. But they have no power. And some people in your life who attempt to frustrate you are struggling with fear, anger, or upset, unsure of who they are, so the best they can do is "attack".
Dick's girlfriend Mary refused to pity Dick. "You can't let one person ruin your life," she adamantly told him. He still cried, sobbed, not knowing what to do at all. "I'll just have to start eating my lunch elsewhere!" he complained. Mary could not believe Dick's cowardice. Why would he cut and run from a lunch lady when he had faced down so many other challenges in his life? Of course, Mary had no knowledge that Dick was an alien from outer space, and no doubt he had faced many other problems of a universal magnitude in his life.
So, at once he resolved that he was not going to let this lunch lady get on his nerves. Her only jollies was getting under his skin, and so he decided to beat her at her own game.
The next time he lined up at the cashier, he dumped a whole bunch of quarters on the counter, and took all of the cracker packages. He then set at a table right across from the cashier, looked the Lunch Lady in the eye, then went about munching, munching, munching away. Instead of smiling, the squat and unhappy lunch lady got madder and madder.
Solomon disarmed the one element that the Lunch Lady had over Dick, and from that point on the alien-turned-professor had no more problems.
The more that I reflect on this moment in TV comedy, the more I realize what it is about certain people who hurt our feeling, who make us scared. Just as Dick was targeted and made to feel '' left out", so people who make us feel "reproached" or "ashamed" cause us to feel dis-ease, then fear in our lives.
When we rest in our righteous standing before God, which works by faith in God's unconditional love for us, we find that all of our fears are banished altogether, and we then discover that people who used to "make us mad" no longer have the power to upset us!
Our greatest enemy is either ourselves, the Enemy, or the world — and all have been crucified, judged, and overcome in Christ. Do not look at your problems. Rest in our righteous standing before God the Father in His Son, and let the Holy Spirit in your heart minister to you that you are righteous, righteous, righteous! — and there is nothing that you, the devil, or the world can do about it!