The Gala

I grew up in a family that insisted on formal dining every night. Not for special occasions….every night. Salad forks and dinner forks, the proper way to hold a knife, elbows off the table, which glass was for water and which was for wine I wasn’t old enough to drink. As a child, none of it made sense to me. It felt arbitrary, a set of rules invented to catch me failing. Why should it matter which side the fork sat on? Who decided these things, and why did I have to perform them at my own kitchen table?

But some inheritances only reveal their worth long after you’ve received them. Years later, I was invited to a fancy gala. the genuinely formal kind, the kind that assumes you already know how to move through a five-course meal without embarrassing yourself or, worse, the people who invited you. Most of my colleagues declined. Ours is a small world, and they feared committing some etiquette sin in front of exactly the people you can’t afford to offend. The risk outweighed even the promise of a lavish meal.

For me, it was the opposite. I was thrilled.

Here, finally, was a chance to exercise a muscle drilled into me as a child and rarely used since. A once in a lifetime kind of opportunity at that. I planned my evening around the courses, arranged an Uber both ways so I could leave whenever I wanted without the fuss of parking or waiting. I wore my nicest dress. I paid for an updo, because my waist-length hair had defeated me and I wasn’t going to walk into that room looking like I’d lost a fight with a brush. The dinner itself was covered on my behalf, which was the only reason I could go at all, because a meal like that was never in my budget. Especially at the time.

The notification came. My driver was here. I stepped out, glanced at the van idling at the curb, and looked up at the face behind the wheel.

I knew him.

I’d met him years before. From what I recall, he had about 7 or 8 children and almost nothing else. He’d been scraping pennies to keep a small family business alive, and the last I’d heard at the time, it was collapsing. He was preparing to file for unemployment and disability, bracing for the failure he could see coming. He was a disabled combat veteran with a complicated past who had only recently come to faith. The last time I saw his face, I had prayed with him. And then he was gone from my life, the way people you meet briefly tend to be.

Until that night, when he pulled up to drive me to a dinner he could only have imagined.

The business had failed. He’d gotten his disability, but it wasn’t enough to keep the lights on, so he’d moved his entire family– all his kids–into his very elderly father’s house. Now he drove Uber through the night, taking any fare he could get in a van I could hear needed serious repair, sleeping almost not at all so he could care for his children during the day, patching the gaps with a second and third job that appeared and vanished with demand. Food stamps. Every dollar accounted for before it arrived. A man working harder than almost anyone I’d ever met, and still barely staying above water.

And here I was in his back seat. Designer dress. Salon hair. Riding to a meal that cost more than he might see in a week, all of it paid for by someone else, so that I could exercise the manners my comfortable childhood had given me.

I sat in that van and could not make peace with the gap between us.

It wasn’t guilt, exactly, though guilt was part of it. It was something closer to vertigo. The disorientation of seeing, in a single frame, two lives that had diverged so completely and understanding how little of the difference either of us had authored.

I hadn’t earned my ease any more than he’d earned his hardship. I’d been handed formal dining and financial padding the way he’d been handed combat and 8 mouths and a dying business. We had both simply been dealt what we were dealt.

Scripture has a lot to say about this kind of discrepancy, and none of it lets me off easy.

James writes with unsettling directness about exactly this scene. Specifically about the assembly that seats the man in fine clothing in a place of honor while telling the poor man to stand off to the side (James 2:1-4). I have quoted this passage before, but sitting in that van gave it a body it had never quite had. I was the one in fine clothing. He was the one who couldn’t come in. And James does not treat this arrangement as neutral. He calls it becoming judges with evil thoughts, a betrayal of the very God we claim to serve the God who, James says in the same breath, chose the poor of this world to be rich in faith.

That last part undid me. Because if anyone in that van had the richer faith, it wasn’t the woman in the designer dress. It was the combat veteran who had come to God late and hard, who prayed over his impossible life and then went out and drove all night to keep his children fed. The kingdom’s economy runs backward from ours. The one I’d instinctively read as beneath my circumstances may well have been standing on higher ground than I was in every way that finally matters.

Jesus was relentless on this point. Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God (Luke 6:20). Not “poor in spirit” in that telling, but poor, actually poor, the ones scraping pennies. He warned that it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom, hard as a camel through a needle’s eye (Matthew 19:24). He told a parable of a rich man in fine linen feasting sumptuously every day while a poor man named Lazarus lay at his gate, and it did not end well for the one in the fine linen (Luke 16:19-31). I have read that parable many times. I had never before read it from inside the fine linen, with Lazarus in the driver’s seat.

There are things I buy without a second thought.

Not extravagant things. A coffee, a book, some small convenience where the difference between the cheaper option and the one I want is a dollar or two, so small it isn’t worth the mental energy to save it. Things I pick up on a whim, in the moment, because my discretionary income has always had enough give that a couple of dollars simply doesn’t register.

For him, every one of those dollars was counted, and worked for, and spent only after deliberation. The margin I don’t even notice was, for that man, the difference between the lights staying on and going out. The carelessness I can afford is itself a form of wealth…. and maybe the truest form, the kind you don’t perceive because you’ve never lived without it. The rich, Proverbs says, answer roughly, but the poor use entreaties (Proverbs 18:23); there is a whole posture toward the world that money quietly purchases, an ease I had mistaken for normal because I’d never known its absence.

This is the part of the discrepancy that convicts me, because the gala was a one-time thing but the thoughtless dollar is every day. And Scripture keeps insisting that what I do with that margin, the unnoticed surplus, is not spiritually neutral. To whom much was given, of him much will be required (Luke 12:48). The one who has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him… how does God’s love abide in him? (1 John 3:17). John doesn’t ask it rhetorically to comfort me. He asks it to expose me.

Even after all these years, I still haven’t resolved this personally.

I mean, I didn’t come home and give away everything I own. To this day, I still buy the coffee. The gap between his life and mine is still there, and I don’t have the power to close it, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of vanity.

But something shifted, and I want to name it precisely. The encounter stripped the invisibility off my own comfort. I had been moving through my life treating my ease as the baseline, the ordinary, the way things simply are…. and treating his hardship, when I thought of it at all, as the exception. That night reversed the frame. His counting of dollars is closer to how most of the world lives. My thoughtless spending is the anomaly. I am the outlier, and I’d been mistaking my outlier status for the norm.

Paul told the Corinthians that the goal was not that others be relieved while they were burdened, but that there be equality.

That the one with abundance might supply the one in need, as it is written, the one who gathered much had nothing left over, and the one who gathered little had no lack (2 Corinthians 8:13-15). I don’t know exactly what that requires of me. But I know it requires more than I’d been giving, and I know it starts with refusing to let my comfort go back to being invisible.

I paid him well. I tipped him more than was probably prudent, which felt both like the least I could do and like an insult to the scale of what he actually needed. And I walked into that gala, and I used the manners my childhood gave me, and I ate the five courses. But I tasted them differently than I would have an hour before.

Because I kept thinking about the man in the van, driving off into the night to catch his next fare.

Rich in a faith I’m not sure I’ve matched, doing more with less than I’ve ever been asked to do, counting the dollars I’ve never once had to count.

And I could not shake the suspicion that in the only economy that finally matters, I was the one who’d been dropped off at the gate, and he was the one being carried to the feast.