Doughnuts prove Christian love still exists

Taylor is a fifth-year electrical engineering student.

By Andrew Taylor

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of having class on
Friday morning before 10 a.m., and if wherever you were coming from
and wherever you were going, you happened to go along Bruin Walk,
you may have noticed something kind of strange. Open
Winchell’s boxes on one of the tables; a huge orange Gatorade
tub, with styrofoam cups and various coffee implements next to it;
people behind the table yelling “Free coffee! Free
doughnuts!”

What the hell is going on?

You don’t see anyone else stopping first week, and you
don’t stop either. “Some kind of gimmick,” you
think. It’s free*, with an asterisk, and the catch is you
have to sign up for a credit card, fill out a survey or something.
After all, it doesn’t take long to figure out that everyone
out on Bruin Walk wants something from you. Your time, your
membership, your money, maybe just your attention. The Daily Bruin
is about as close as you get to free, and even they sell
advertising space.

They’re still there second week.

But say this time you missed breakfast. You’re late for
class, you’re hungry as hell and those doughnuts look really
good. So you stop, look one of the Doughnut Keepers in the eye, put
on a look that says you’re ready to laugh in his face if it
turns out they want too much from you, and ask “So “¦
what’s the catch?”

What’s the catch? We all know there has to be one.
Everything costs money. Everyone acts from personal interest at
least 98 percent of the time. Even that’s optimistic. And
anyone who says they want to give you something free* is out to
manipulate you somehow, to put you in their debt. This is the sad
wisdom of our world, and by now we’ve probably all learned it
either the easy way (observation) or the hard way (by getting
screwed).

And yet, 30 seconds later you’re walking away with a
doughnut that you didn’t have to do anything for. You
didn’t tell them your e-mail address, you didn’t sign
up for anything. There wasn’t any place to put donations. You
ponder the weirdness for a minute, then shrug. You’ve got
more important things to worry about. Who really cares, anyway?

Third week you ditch class. We all have our days.

Forth week they’re still there. And along with being
hungry, you’re genuinely curious, so this time you have to
stop and ask, “What are you doing here?”

The answer doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Maybe they
mumble something about “serving the campus,” or
“showing God’s love.” They don’t seem to
really understand it themselves. But they do smile at you, and the
fact that once again you got free breakfast out of the deal again
leads you to think that smile might even be genuine.

Religious freaks, you conclude. Nice religious freaks,
relatively harmless maybe, but weirdos nonetheless. “Wannabe
holy fools,” you think to yourself with a grin as you walk
away. But maybe later, when the donut is just a lump of calories
moving through your stomach, you catch yourself wondering about
it.

Is there a catch? Why are they doing this?

I’ve been a member of AGO, UCLA’s Christian
fraternity for almost five years. (I’m an engineer, OK.) Over
the two-and-a-half years that we’ve been giving out food on
Friday mornings, I’ve been asked variants of those two
questions many times. I think I’ve finally figured out the
answers, at least for myself.

We do it to prove a point.

Against the conventional wisdom that nothing is free, that
there’s always a catch, we stand as fools. In our goofy,
ineffectual way, we are trying to point to another truth we believe
is at work in our world: Life is grace. Real life, real freedom,
belong not to those who deserve it, who strive for it and wrestle
the world into submission, but to those who can accept it like
children.

Pare Christianity down, slice away all the dogma, theology,
institutions and mistakes, and at the heart that is what it says.
We can be saved from the darkness around us, from the darkness
within us, if we open our hands and receive it as a gift.

This is our sinister motivation. This is the catch. When you
take a cup of coffee or a doughnut as a gift from total strangers,
you are, whether you realize it or not, implicitly accepting the
possibility that there just might be such a thing as a free
breakfast.

It doesn’t prove anything, of course. It’s just a
donut, for God’s sake; it costs 50 cents and if you really
wanted it you could have gotten an even better one from Krispy
Kreme. So if the Jesus-nuts think they’ve won some kind of
argument by giving you one, they’re even stupider than you
first thought. And you’re right; it’s a meaningless
gesture, an umbrella raised against a hurricane. Which is why
we’re fools for doing it.

We do it anyway, because we believe, or at least hope, that
someday God’s foolishness will turn out to be a better bet
than the conventional wisdom. We have found the thing we were
starving to death for, and it was free for the taking.