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Bibles in the Waiting Room
Go outside and you'll see the reasons. Go online for five minutes and there's always a story, so many that it would be easy to ride the bummer train over and over without ever running out of material. But this week's story is worth sitting with, because it exposes something about how our culture argues, and it's a reminder that now is a critical time to keep sharing the gospel, not shrink back from it.
The Video
A woman takes her kids to a new dentist, sees Bibles laid out on the tables, and marches up to the front desk. She cancels the appointment on the spot: "I'm not playing games anymore. This is not a Christian nation. You don't need to have Bibles out everywhere in your office." Then comes the closer, a jab at people who offer to pray for her, followed by a stream of vulgarity that got edited out for obvious reasons.
Start with the delivery, because it matters before you even get to the content. When someone you've never met unloads a barrage of vulgarity on you out of nowhere, that's a big warning sign. That's a red flag. It's a form of abuse, real verbal abuse, and it's not normal human interaction, even if cursing has become the norm in a culture. Cursing being normal in a culture doesn't make it normal for a human being to direct at a stranger.
It also reveals something deeper about how desensitized people become to red flags the longer they live inside a culture that treats this kind of outburst as acceptable. A woman who's never been mistreated like that tends to catch the signal immediately; something in her says "this isn't right." But when that behavior becomes normalized, background noise, people lose the ability to flag it. It's the same phenomenon you see with women who've been abused by a spouse: they're statistically more likely to be abused again, because the alarm bells that should go off don't fire the way they should anymore.
Gramster Rant: The Bible on the Table
Here's the actual problem with the video, and it isn't the vulgarity. It's what she's demanding, versus what the same crowd refuses to extend to anyone else.
Can we talk about the shopping cart return of cultural arguments? For years, the message from the alphabet mafia has been unambiguous: Christians don't get a say in how they run their businesses, their events, or their own tables. Pride Night gets swapped for Faith and Family Night by the Texas Rangers, and suddenly that's labeled oppressive, that's labeled bigotry. A baker in Colorado named Jack declines to make one cake, and it turns into a years-long persecution campaign that never seems to end. The rule has always been simple and one-directional: your convictions don't get to shape your business.
And then this woman opts out of a business based on her own convictions. She sees a Bible on a table, and she leaves. Which, fine. Good for you. That's your right. But then allow the same right to everyone else. Don't force the baker to make the cake. Don't force the photographer to shoot the wedding. Don't force anyone to wave a flag to keep their job. You don't get to live on a one-way street where your convictions are sacred and everyone else's are optional.
That's the irony sitting right at the center of this clip. She exposed herself, without realizing it, as validating the exact thing conservative Christians have been asking for the entire time: a world of fair play where everybody gets treated the same way. If you don't like the Bibles, don't patronize the business, and Christian business owners will extend that same grace when it's their turn to decline.
Romans chapter 1 has language for this. It talks about a depraved mind, a debased mind, and that word literally means unable to care for oneself. That's what's on display here. When significance isn't rooted in Christ, the ability to see the forest for the trees goes with it. There's no capacity left to notice that the very thing being demanded for yourself is the same thing being denied to everyone else.
And there's a bigger loss buried underneath all of it. Thousands upon thousands of people whose lives have been transformed out of that lifestyle by Jesus Christ never get a seat at this table. Their testimonies get brushed off entirely. Nobody from that world gets to speak into the conversation. That's the real tragedy sitting underneath a viral clip like this one, and it's worth remembering the next time a video like this starts making the rounds.
The internet, predictably, had thoughts. One commenter called her exit "a clean self-extraction, no dentist required." Another user, Jewels, shared getting thrown out of an orthodontist's office for refusing a mask after California had already dropped its own mandate, proof the hypocrisy cuts both ways. And yes, somebody made a Kewpie doll joke about her haircut. Not exactly theology, but it landed.
Right On or Way Off?
"Don't tell me that queer people are trying to shove their agenda down people's throats when everywhere I go there's Bibles around."
WAY OFF. A Bible sitting quietly on a waiting room table isn't being shoved anywhere. Nobody is required to read it, pick it up, or acknowledge it exists. Meanwhile, a business owner declining to participate in something that violates their conscience gets labeled discrimination and dragged through years of legal battles. Those two things are not the same weight of imposition, and pretending they are is exactly the blindness Romans 1 describes. If a Bible on a table is oppressive, then every principle used to punish Christian business owners for the last decade needs to be thrown out too. Can't have it both ways.
Salvaged by God Deep Dive: Ephesians 6:12
None of this, her rant, her haircut, the vulgarity, is actually who the fight is against.
"For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the powers, against the world forces of this darkness, against the spiritual forces of wickedness in heavenly places."
Three things worth carrying out of this verse:
- The person isn't the enemy. She's someone operating under the same blindness Romans 1 describes, unable to see her own hypocrisy. Prayers for her may feel like nails on a chalkboard to her right now, and that's fine. Pray them anyway.
- The real opposition is spiritual, not personal. Getting angry at her, mocking her, or trying to win an argument against her misses the actual battlefield entirely.
- The armor of God isn't for swinging, it's for standing firm. Verses 13 through 17 lay out the full armor, and the sword in that armor is scripture. That's the unleashed tiger let loose on the soul the moment the goal shifts from winning the argument to simply proclaiming the truth.
Practical application: the next viral clip like this one will show up again, and probably soon. The response doesn't change. Stand firm, speak the truth, and leave the convicting to the Spirit. Nobody has ever argued their way into someone else's salvation.
Why the Message Won't Get Softer
There's a temptation buried in moments like this one, the urge to keep softening the message until it stops offending anyone. It won't work. There is no version of the gospel gentle enough to avoid offense, because the core of the message is inherently humbling: people aren't basically good and in need of a small boost, they're in need of total transformation. No one has ever been drawn to Jesus purely because they found someone likable. Likability might open a door, but eventually the actual message has to be spoken, and the actual message will land hard no matter how carefully it's phrased.
This is the flaw baked into the whole seeker-sensitive movement, the idea that if the church can just be relatable enough, approachable enough, unoffensive enough, people will come around on their own. Some of the underlying instincts aren't wrong: be someone people can count on, be willing to serve, be available to pray for people. But sensitivity has a ceiling. Somebody offended by the mere existence of a Bible on a waiting room table was never going to be reached by a slightly softer approach. The goal was never to be liked. It was to be understood.
It will never be enough, full stop. There will always be another flaw to pick at, another line to move. So stop trying to accommodate a way into acceptance, and just be who God called you to be.
Book Club
This Present Darkness by Frank Peretti. It's been out of print for a while now, so it might take some digging to track down a copy, but if it's never been read, it's worth the hunt. It's fiction, and typically that's not the recommendation of choice, generally speaking, but this one earns the exception. It paints a vivid picture of the spiritual battle actually underway, the one that gets more visible by the week.
Meme of the Day
From Voddie Bauckham Ministries: don't let the game being played cause a retreat from living optimistically, and don't let it talk anyone out of wanting God's truth to infiltrate the culture so the culture can be blessed. The point, in Bauckham's own words repeated here, is that nobody gets to shrink back just because things are getting harder. Keep speaking the truth of God's word so it works its way into the culture, because that's what blesses it. It takes the focus off self and puts it squarely on what God can still do with a culture that looks like this one.
Final Thoughts
Seek God today in how to be bold in sharing the gospel, and in loving the people who hate for it, because that's what actually blesses a culture. This lady and her haircut and her rant about Bibles isn't the point, and she isn't the enemy. She's a reminder: be bold in the gospel while there's still time to be bold. Don't shrink back. Don't be afraid. The struggle was never against flesh and blood in the first place.