Woman Tipped 2 Servers $1077 Because The Rapture Was Coming — Returned After The Eclipse To Demand Her Money Back
Ah yes, berating employees for your own mistake, just as Christ would have done…
aeonWAVE / fizkes / Benjamin Haas / Shutterstock A server and her co-workers have been left shaking their heads after a series of interactions with a Christian woman who was convinced the world was ending on April 8, 2024 — and who is now hoppin' mad and behaving in a most un-Christian fashion.
The woman is furious the eclipse wasn't the rapture and is demanding refunds for her generous tips.
Unlike most eclipses, the one on April 8 was special for Americans because the U.S. was in the "path of totality," a roughly 100-mile-wide swath from Texas to Maine in which the Moon completely obscures the Sun and ushers in a brief period of nighttime in the middle of the day.
And for many Christians, this meant one thing: The Rapture, the supposed moment when true believers in Jesus Christ will be sucked up to heaven by God's giant vacuum cleaner so He can slaughter the rest of us with 1,000 years of bloodblood rain and locust-tornadoes because we're bad, naughty sinners who had make-out parties before marriage and voted for Democrats and whatnot!
Of course, we live in deeply stupid times in which some 25% of Americans literally believe that the world is run by a cabal of baby-eating Satanists led by Hillary Clinton and Oprah Winfrey. So naturally, social media was full of conspiracy theories about the eclipse for weeks, all of them ridiculous, some hilariously bizarre.
But the Rapture theory seemed to have had the truest believers — like, for instance, a woman who came into a Redditor's restaurant over the weekend and tipped like the world was about to end… and is now blaming her servers for the fact that she was duped.
The woman tipped two servers nearly $1100 because she was convinced the eclipse was the Rapture.
"A woman came to our restaurant the other day with a friend," the server wrote in her post. "She was nice but kept trying to proselytize to me."
Then things got even weirder. "She tipped $300 on a $40 bill and wrote on the receipt 'in case you don't rise on the 8th,'" she wrote. "These people genuinely think they're going to rise into heaven on April 8th."
Then, the woman returned two days later and was waited on by another server. "She kept asking if he was Christian, to which he said no, and then she started talking about how awful it'll be after the Rapture… for sinners left on Earth."
The co-worker did his best to be polite and respectful, and it paid off handsomely. "The woman tipped him $777," which she said was "the Lord's numbers" as opposed to Satan's number 666, and told him, "He'll need it after."
He was so startled by the amount that he had a manager verify the tip because he didn't want "to take money from this delusional woman." She confirmed it and then promptly left. How quickly her story changed on April 9.
The woman returned after realizing the eclipse wasn't the Rapture and claimed her $1077 in tips were fraudulent.
I, for one, am shocked that an eclipse that was mathematically predicted by the Babylonians didn't turn out to be the magical moment all the good Christians were sucked out of their shoes on the sidewalk to float up to heaven through God's celestial bendy straw! Who could have seen this coming?!
But it didn't seem to have occurred to this woman that she'd been duped. Instead, she thought it was the other way around and returned to accuse the servers of fraud and having "tampered" with the tips — which the server said was "literally impossible."
Aside from the fact that her manager verified the $777 tip, the restaurant physically hands a credit card machine to each customer so they can either select a default tip or opt out and enter a custom tip themselves. "That's exactly what she did," the server wrote.
That didn't satisfy the woman, of course. When a manager explained all this, "she stormed out angrily to her Mercedes," just as Christ would have done, of course.
People couldn't help but laugh at this absurd story — especially since many Bible scholars say the Rapture isn't even in the Bible.
"So lying and trying to steal [the money] back, how very Christian of her," one Redditor commented. "I honestly thought she would just never show her face there again."
"This is why it’s so easy to grift off them," another wrote. "I really wish I didn’t have any scruples or morals because I would be a millionaire." That may sound harsh, but that commenter has a point.
The Rapture quite literally isn't real, even in the Bible. It is an invention of early 19th-century theologian John Nelson Darby based on what Bible scholars say is a misinterpretation of key verses, most notably writings by the Apostle Paul in 1 Thessalonians.
And the entire "End Times" prophecy story so many Christians are obsessed with is itself a misinterpretation. Scholars say the Book of Revelation, on which it is mostly based, is actually an elaborate revenge fantasy against the Roman Empire for its persecution of early Christians at the time of its writing.
The much-vaunted "Antichrist's number" of 666 itself is a code name for the Roman Emperor Nero based on Hebrew numerology because identifying him explicitly would have been punishable by death.
Perhaps most importantly, Jesus Christ himself is quoted in the Bible as saying that nobody but God would know "the day nor hour" of the end of the world.
Nevertheless, these misinterpretations — and especially the prospect of being "left behind" by the Rapture — have been used as a cudgel for decades to scare Christians and would-be Christians into adhering to zealous evangelicals' interpretations of Christianity.
Many former evangelical Christians speak openly about the way hearing about the Rapture has traumatized them, especially during their childhoods (full disclosure: myself included).
Because, you know, the notion that at any time a kid could wake up to find they weren't good enough to go to heaven and have been left to fend for themself as God makes it rain blood is, you know, terrifying to an adult, let alone a child. It's not hard to imagine many such people having felt a moment of panic on Monday when their feet remained firmly planted on the ground during the eclipse.
It's profoundly sad that religion has leveraged fear to delude this many people. Already, propagators of these myths are working overtime on social media to explain away the fact that the Rapture didn't come this week or to deny they ever claimed it would — just like they did after the 2017 eclipse and after the year 2012 didn't bring about the end, either.
Before long, they'll have a new event they claim is the end of the world that will have the devout's teeth needlessly on edge — or furious and berating servers, in the case of this restaurant patron.
Maybe that one will be the one to finally wake them up. We'll surely hear about it either way.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.