Sunday, October 29, 2017

Coffee Revelation



            I adore coffee.  It’s not just about the caffeine, although I have discovered that my body now needs it to get through the day.  (Whoops.)  It’s about the flavor, the heat, the experience of it.  I love the feel of a good coffee mug in my hand.  I love the aroma that coffee gives off.  I love the act of getting the water-to-grounds ratio just right.  I love that  first sip of the morning.  The experience of coffee, for me, is that of loveliness.
            I first found my way to coffee shortly after I got married.  I was just starting to get into lattes and stuff when I got pregnant and had to lay off for a while, but then after my first child was born, I began really enjoying coffee 3-4 times a week.  The thing is, I wasn’t into coffee all by itself.  I loved lattes.  I loved those big frothy, sugary coffee drinks you can get on every street corner.  At home, I would make a cup of coffee and then fill ‘er up with flavored creamer.  I was willing to allow the calories of my day be eaten up by big sugary coffee wonder because I enjoyed it. 
            About a year and a half ago, I was establishing care with a regular doctor for the first time in my adult life.  I went from under my parents’ medical care to working as a missionary to being married and then almost IMMEDIATELY pregnant for what seemed like 6 years straight.  Somewhere in there I quit having a regular doctor, I would just go to my OBGYN when I needed to (which is to say ALL THE TIME) and then just hit the clinic when I needed meds or something.  But one day, while I was in the clinic having my arm looked at because I had fallen and was afraid it was sprained, the doctor on duty strongly recommended I start establishing care with someone, and she said she had some openings.  Fine.  I’ll go be an adult.  Whatever. 
            In the course of establishing care, she did a routine blood panel, and not surprisingly, I was starting to have blood sugar issues.  It is the curse in my family.  Mom, Dad, brother, grandmother – all have, or had, diabetes.  I had been a gestational diabetic.  It was sort of inevitable.  I was not yet full-blown, so the doctor put me on meds and gave me some nutritional guidance, some of which was, of course, to cut down on sugar.  The two main sources of sugar in my life were coffee and soda pop.  I am still fighting the saga of the soda, and I am sure that will be a spiritual illustration in itself at some point, but today we are talking about coffee.
            I did not want to give up my daily coffee routine, so I decided to bite the bullet and attempt to drink it either black or with just half and half.  I began making it and just adding some half and half to it, but left out the sugar.
            And something amazing happened.
            I discovered the life of a coffee drinker that I thought I had been living was a façade.  I had not been enjoying coffee at all, I had been enjoying coffee-flavored corn syrup. As I developed a taste for coffee with no sugar, I began experiencing coffee in a new way.  I began to care about where it came from.  I began to notice the difference in flavors and roasts.  I began to appreciate the difference between stuff you buy at Wal-Mart that’s been on the shelves for weeks and coffee that has been freshly roasted and ground.  I began to savor my daily coffee, to revel in it.  It wasn’t just a sugary mess anymore.  It was something real and rich.  It was coffee as it was actually meant to be experienced. 
            Not only that, but I couldn’t take the fake stuff anymore.  About nine months later, it was Christmastime, and someone had given me a coffee shop gift card.  I thought hey – I’ll treat myself, I haven’t had a big ol’ sugary coffee drink in months.  But I found I couldn’t even get through it.  The sugar was overpowering.  I would up throwing about half of it away because it was not an enjoyable experience anymore.  I wanted the real thing.  The replacement wasn’t good enough.
            How much of our walk with God is a big ol’ sugary mess?  How much of our spiritual life is a few tablespoons of the real thing with a bunch of fake good-tasting stuff heaped on top?  The Christian life can be all sunshine and roses, all sweetness and sugar – but if that’s what it is, then it’s not real.  It’s a façade.  If you are living a Christian life of a weekly feel-good message, a five minute devo of pretty words, and a few pats on the back, then you’re trying to sustain your life off of a 20 ounce mocha latte.  It might shoot you up for a while, but then you will come crashing down, and you’ll be hungry for more sugar instead of what sustains you.  You’re not experiencing the real thing.  You are scratching the surface of the life God means for you to have.  God has designed your life for richness, for velvety smoothness, for real flavor and variety.  Freshness matters.  Bitterness matters.  He strongly desires to give you the real richness of life.  But you can choose to live in the sugar and the lattes, and you will be fat, dumb, and happy – but you won’t experience the joy God wants you to have.  You won’t experience the life He has planned for you.  There is so much more out there. 
            C.S. Lewis wrote “It would seem that Our Lord finds our desires not too strong, but too weak. We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.” We truly are.  God presents us with a holiday at sea, and we stay content with our mud pies.  God offers us real flavor, and we settle for corn syrup.  God desires us to be fully alive, but we are content to slumber away.
            Awake and arise to the full life God has for you.  Open your eyes and the rest of your sense to fully experience the mystery God has mapped out for your life.  You won’t be able to go back to the fake stuff – you will crave what is real because the call of Eden is in you, and everything of the world as it exists now is but a shadow of what awaits us.  Keep reaching up, for you were meant for so much more than corn syrup.  You were meant for greatness.


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