Petar Pavlov / Foter.com / CC BY

Remember the guy in the Chick-Fil-A drive through? Indignant about Dan Cathy’s religious beliefs, he recorded himself ranting about it to the woman working the window. But things backfired after he posted it. When it was viewed by people who weren’t experiencing the adrenaline rush of confrontation, he looked like a jerk. He ended up losing his job and becoming an object of public mockery.

A similar video has surfaced. A woman in Florida, upset over not being given a receipt for her order and then allegedly being treated rudely by a Dunkin Donuts employee, goes into the same store the next morning to enact revenge. She states throughout the encounter that she’s recording it to put on Facebook. It’s clear that she thinks that she will be seen as the hero and that her video will cause all kinds of grief for the employees. Instead she looks foolish and the employees have been commended for keeping cool heads.

I’m fascinated by these videos. I worked several years in retail, and while encounters like these don’t happen every day, anyone who works with the public will deal with this kind of irrational behavior from time to time. (And yes, I realize this goes both ways. I’ve received rude service in my life, and I didn’t always handle myself well at work.)

One of the most telling encounters happened early in my career. A woman was accusing me of lying about her prescription copay (the internet was new back then, and people didn’t understand that we were just passing on the insurance claim, not coming up with the prices ourselves). She was mid-tirade when she realized that my husband and I were clients of her business, and that if I decided to take my business elsewhere, she was going to lose a lot more than the five dollars she was screaming at me about. Watching her try to backpeddle and soften her words was interesting. But what was especially interesting was her apology when she realized she couldn’t gloss over what she’d already said. “And here I was thinking that it was my turn, only to be yelling at one of my own customers.”

I think the phrase “my turn” is key. People in these situations feel like they are on a righteous crusade. In my example, the woman realized that I wasn’t an anonymous face, but someone she knew. I think these videos have the same effect. The camera reveals something that our anger conceals: The person receiving our wrath is a fellow human. Without the cameras people could shade the truth in their heads. When they told the story afterwards (and I’ve always believed people do this mostly to have a good story to tell later), they could adjust the story in response to their listener’s reaction. They could “forget” to mention how the other person was polite and apologetic, and only recount how they stood there silently. They could interpret the employees’ actions any way they pleased.

But when you throw in a camera, the camera doesn’t lie. You can’t spin it or shade it. It’s there for the whole world to see. And it underlines an aspect of human nature mentioned in Scipture: “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

In other words, we’re not honest with ourselves about the depth of our sin. We believe ourselves to be better than we are, and we are blind to our own faults. When people post video encounters like these and get a different reaction than they planned, we get a rare glimpse into the phenomenon.

I felt very smug when I first saw the video. I enjoyed the idea of a rude person receiving their comeuppance. That’s wrong, too. I don’t go into retail stores throwing fits because I know how foolish it looks, but I know I have many blind spots in my life. I cringe to imagine what a camera would reveal about me if I could see myself in those sinful moments.

I’m thankful to have a Savior who died for all my sins, even the ones I can’t see.

{Wes} / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I think it was the way he was standing that caught my attention. I was passing by our living room, probably carrying a basket of laundry. Todd stood frozen in front of the television, remote in hand. Pictures of two young boys, school pictures, were on the screen.

Both pictures were familiar. One was a boy who had been abducted a few days before. The other was a boy who had gone missing nearly five years earlier. Both boys lived in nearby counties, close enough to make them local stories. Our local news had covered both abductions thoroughly, and had faithfully kept the story of the long-missing boy alive. Every few weeks they would mention him and flash the same school picture on the screen, even as it became easier to tally the time he’d been gone in years rather than weeks or days. Now “FOUND” was written in bold letters across the screen.

I stared at the TV, trying to comprehend what the news anchor was saying. “They found both of them?” I asked. Todd nodded. “I think so.”

Over the next few days, the story came out. A boy had been able to describe a truck he’d seen speeding from the area of the second kidnapping. Someone called the police to say a coworker’s truck matched the description. When the police entered the apartment in hopes of finding the second boy, another boy was there. It’s reported that he walked up to the officers and said, “I’m Shawn Hornbeck.”

When they mentioned the location of the suburban St. Louis apartment where the boys were held, I realized I knew exactly where it was.

We had been at a party in a nearby house several years prior. It was memorable because the house was one of my favorite sorts of houses. Old but well maintained, on a picturesque, tree-lined street. Though it was smaller than the house featured in the movie Home Alone, it was a similar.

When I complimented the hostess on the home, she was transparent in a way that surprised me. Besides the usual remarks that old houses require a lot of upkeep, she mentioned that she didn’t like all the home’s entrances. There were so many side entrances and garage and basement doors she felt exposed. Coupled with the creaks and groans that old houses make, and the fact that they lived so close to the railroad tracks, she always felt vulnerable.

I nodded in agreement but mentally blew it off. I was working and going to school in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of one of the country’s most dangerous cities. Two years before my car had been stolen and purposely wrecked as part of a gang initiation. This neighborhood, though, was one of the nice ones. Surely it was safe. But though this was a few years before the kidnappings, the apartment where these boys were held was right nearby. There really had been a monster living in her midst.

Now we’re in a small town. Our courthouse square looks like something out of a 1950s Americana movie set. And though the serious crimes here are few and far between, I have some sort of a connection to every one. I usually know one of the victims. In one particularly disturbing case I had regular contact through my work with the perpetrator.

When I hear of something horrendous, my first impulse is to tell myself why I’m safe from such a situation. I list the ways I’m on guard, how I can keep that particular disaster from befalling us. Other things are so random I throw my hands up in dismay. A shooting in a movie theater or a mall? We could avoid those two places, I suppose, but we can’t stop going out in public altogether. And even if we did stay home, my years working at a children’s hospital has shown me that’s not safe, either. Name a common household appliance, and I can probably recall an incident where a child was hurt or killed by one that malfunctioned.

I struggle to hold these truths in my mind. Our actions have consequences, and we must live wisely, but there are no guarantees. God is in control, but he allows things to happen for reasons we can’t comprehend.

It’s not something I can wrap up with a nice bow or top off with a pithy sentence. It just is.