A Message

Today is a hard day. I, like many others, have endured a lot of trials in the last week and a half since the news broke that Kate Kelly and John Dehlin were facing excommunication.

Fortunately, not everyone has been cruel or unkind, and this is what I want to bring to others today. We need strength as a community, so I am sending this missive into the void in hopes that it brings happiness to my friends today.

Perceived Threats

As any of my close friends (and several not-very-close friends) can tell you, I have spent a lot of time working in restaurants.

If you have worked in a restaurant before, you know that every person serves an important purpose in the restaurant. If you haven't, let me demonstrate: The cooks work together to prepare the food before a shift, then cook it together on a line of anywhere from 3 to 10 men. They place their hard work in a "window" under heat lamps where a manager, assistant manager, or food runner add the final preparations: spoons, knives, napkins, or other small embellishes. Once the plate is picture perfect (at least it had to be in most of the places where I worked), either a food runner or servers will take the food from the window to the specific table and seat number, placing it neatly in front of the diner. The diner has at this point already given their order to an exhausted server, hopefully with minor modifications if any, after having been shown to a free and clean table by the host or hostess on shift. The table was cleaned by bussers probably only minutes (at times moments) before the diners sat down. So, bringing you a good dinner at a restaurant takes about 10-15 people working together, not including the staff behind the kitchen endlessly cleaning dishes and bringing them back out for use in the kitchen and on the restaurant floor.

Hopefully all 10-15 of them cleaned their hands. via