As this short season of Advent swirls around us in a flurry of busyness, the word fiat has been on my heart. It is after all, thanks to Mary's fiat, her "yes" to God's will, that the whole Incarnation came about as it did. She said yes to something that could cause scandal, yes to bringing up the Son of God, yes to carrying Him in her body for nine months, yes to giving birth to Him.
She probably didn't know when she said "yes" that she'd have to give birth to Him after more than a week of bumbling along on a donkey while nine months pregnant, or that she'd have to give birth to Him in a cold, dark, dirty stable, or that after His birth they'd have to hide out in the desert for two years. She probably didn't know when she said "yes" that she would have to watch him suffer and die at the hands of the people He loved so dearly. But she said "yes" to God, and though it caused her times of pain and suffering, she allowed God to use her to help bring about the salvation of the world, through the miracle of a tiny baby.
In a way, this is how God uses all of our fiats. Every time we place our trust in God, we say "yes" to His will for the salvation of the world. Most of the time we don't have any idea how His plans will unfold, but we know that it likely won't be easy. There will be sacrifice, pain, and suffering along the way, but it is through this sanctifying grace that we are transformed to become whatever God wants us to be. It is through our fiats that He brings about the most glorious things!
This year, my greatest desire is for us all to appreciate more fully the love that God has for us. He came to earth to be one of us, to share in our human experience, to be treated horribly and executed so that our sins will not be held against us.
The miracle of the Incarnation becomes more real for me every year, and when I close my eyes, I find myself on my knees. I kneel beside the manger, holding Mary's hand as she rests and recovers from the difficult journey and the birth. While she sleeps, I watch over her baby, my brother, my King. I want to touch the soft cheek of the baby Jesus, because I know that with only a touch, I can be healed of my petty, whiny, selfishness.
O heal me, Jesus, and help me to embrace fully the plans You have for my life. Help me to focus on the love and blessings I do have and not be so worried and anxious about what I don't have. And thank You for coming to save us.
May the joy and peace of the infant Jesus fill our hearts this Christmas season!
(To see the sweetest interpretation of how God's ways are beyond our wildest imaginings,
On a cloudless autumn day, under the sky so peacefully blue, the sun shines down like rain. The tops of the trees catch the light like fire and begin to flicker like flames in the soft breeze.
And in the midst of the warm, bright plans we make, doubt creeps in and darkness grips the soul of it all.
Sweet gray pots etched with silver words and holding baby flowers catch my eye and speak to me: Love, they say. Joy. Believe. Words that remind me, words that call forth beauty, hope, peace, words that call me on to live these things in my life.
We don't need any more plants in our tiny apartment, but the words and the sweet baby orchid blossoms of white and purple beckon me. On closer inspection, I see the pots are cracked--hence the reason they are sitting in the break room marked down for associates.
I don't need a broken pot with another orchid in it, I tell my husband.
No, you don't, he says, but you're going to get one anyway.
He knows me well.
I find it difficult to choose only one, because I need all of these reminders! I know that the greatest of these is Love and that in the humdrum routine of the daily grind I struggle often to be Joy, but I choose the healthiest looking plant with promising baby white blooms and it tells me Believe.
Life goes on and continues to resist our efforts to move forward. As darkness and doubt creep in, it would be easy to let them consume us, to crush our hope. But there in the corner of our living room is a little broken pot that reminds us: Believe.
Believe.And I know that this imperfect pot is a grace, a simple moment of beauty that God is using to show me my imperfect self and a deeper truth.
While we make our plans, we trust in God and His perfect plan. We know that when the outcome is not what we would prefer it to be, ultimately it is what God wants, and therefore, it is perfect. This is not always easy to grasp, but then, the cross never is. And we know that without the cross, there would be no glory.
Without our cracks, our brokenness, our wounds, our weaknesses, our darkness, we would not need His Mercy.
We are all imperfect, cracked and broken, but no matter how beaten and bruised we are, we always have a home with God. He heals our wounds and uses them to make us more beautiful than we were before. We learn to trust in Him. And life happens and we get hurt again and again, but we continue to trust and believe in His Mercy, His Healing Love, His Goodness.
Sometimes the wounds cut deep and take time to heal, and sometimes the darkness seems never-ending, and as we wait to feel healed, we wonder what the point is of continuing to believe, to hope. But in the darkness and in our pain, we are closest to Him on the cross. He holds us in His Heart so that our thirst is His thirst, and I have found that the surest way to quench this thirst for both of us is tochoose tobelieve, to pray over and over, "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24).
And He will. He will absolutely help your unbelief. And it probably won't be at all in the way you think, but He will fix your broken pot, and in the meantime, He'll give you grace, which might look like precious baby orchids. Or something else entirely. Or something that you can't even see. No matter how the grace falls--like petals, like snow, like an invisible strength deep inside you--never forget that He loves you, He loves you, He loves you!
HE LOVES YOU.
P.S. If you're looking for a more book-length encouragement on how to keep hoping in the darkest darkness, check out Daring to Hope by Katie Davis Majors. I highly recommend it! #goodreads
Coffee coffee coffee is my mantra. I love coffee. I love trying new coffees, making coffee, sharing coffee. When a co-worker/coffee friend gave me a delicious bag of beans from a recent trip, I thanked her for sharing the coffee with me, and she replied, "Of course, that's what coffee is for."
Communion. Every cup is a communion. It is the sharing, the community, the relationships between co-workers and customers that have grown and evolved over the years that I love the most.
Still, I don't necessarily want to be a barista forever. And in the restlessness of wondering, the aching for more than pouring coffee and making lattes and being constantly sucked dry of all energy from being on my feet and socializing all day (which let me tell you, for this introvert, is exhausting), I find peace only in the One who made the stars and the sea and the coffee trees.
Gratitude is too shallow a word to describe the depth of joy I find at the gift of His peace, manifested in His mercy and grace, especially in the darkness that has recently visited. In the exhaustion that cannot be cured by coffee (yeah, I said it), He picks up my weary soul and carries me through it all.
Just after the recent canonization of my beloved Saint Mother Teresa of Calcutta, I picked up a free copy from church of With Great Love, a book of reflections on Mother Teresa by Susan Conroy, who spent time working with the saint. Saint Mother Teresa and her patron, Saint Therese of Lisieux have always been close to my heart, and I aspire to follow their examples of putting great love into the every little action, no matter how simple.
In this looooong week of work full of too many too-early mornings, God, in His mercy and grace, graced me with the perfect reflection on this very subject from Susan Conroy. It's a lesson I have heard so many times throughout my life, and a lesson I have attempted to apply to my time working in coffee over the years. But as I recently heard, our spiritual lives are not linear. They are not gradual uphill climbs, but rather, they are paths full of stumbling and falling and, by the grace of God, persevering toward that seemingly ever elusive holiness and perfect communion with Him.
Every cup is a communion. Not a perfect communion, but a communion of all our broken humanity scooped up into a mug, a chalice, a hug, a smile.
"Let every action of mine be something beautiful for God," said Saint Mother Teresa. As she wandered the streets of Calcutta, she and her sisters performed simple tasks, such as sitting with the dying so they didn't have to die alone, or providing a blanket to someone who was shivering, or giving a glass of water to someone who was thirsty. As Conroy describes:
"It was not the work that was extraordinary, but rather, the way in which it was done. It was the spirit of the work that made it extraordinary: the spirit of love, humility, tenderness and respect with which each human being was touched and held and cared for. It was precisely this spirit of love and humility that made Mother Teresa a saint and made every action of hers 'something beautiful for God.'
"It is always about the love. Love, love, love. Mother Teresa said that this is the reason we exist--to love and serve God by loving and serving one another....
"It doesn't matter how much we give, but rather how much love we put in the giving. [Mother Teresa] encouraged us to 'put love into everything you do, and you will be fulfilling your vocation.'
"'God is Love,' Saint John the apostle tells us. Do everything with God. Do everything with 'the fullness of charity' in your heart, and you will be fulfilling your duty and your destiny in a way that is most pleasing to God."
No matter what I do, even as I search for work beyond barista-ing, I can put love into each little action, into each cup of coffee I pour, into each dish I wash, into each person I meet.
Yes, coffee coffee coffee is my mantra, but what is coffee all about? It is about the people, the communion, the love.
After a morning of making countless $1 Pumpkin Spice Lattes, you might think that I wouldn't want to spend my afternoon writing about it. HOWEVER, I drank a PSL myself and have that caffeine and sugar coursing through my veins and sparking inspiration all up in my heart and soul.
I came home and finally looked up this 20/20 story my mom has been telling me about, about baristas and the horrible things they do to people's drinks. I found it fascinating. I can relate to these bitter baristas. In fact, just yesterday I had a moment of understanding as I realized the reason we get so frustrated with customers and they get so frustrated with us is that we are not speaking the same language.
The language we speak is that of well-trained and experienced baristas. We know where these coffees come from, the altitude at which they are grown, the anatomy of a coffee plant, the names of the farmers who grow it, how the coffees are processed, what each step in the process entails, and what each step means for how that coffee will ultimately taste when we brew it, not to mention what all the variables are in the brewing process and how they affect the taste of the coffee.
The language our customers speak, on the other hand, is often (not always, but often) a twisted mess of coffee terms made popular by places from McDonald's to Starbucks to Intelligentsia. They often know only that they need something to wake them up, or that they like caramel frappes, or that they hate coffee and want a coffee drink that doesn't taste like coffee.
The biggest challenge of our jobs as baristas is to pick through and translate the layers of this language in order to discern the unique palates of our many customers so that we can find the right drink for them--all in the most fast-paced, efficient, and pleasant way possible.
In general, baristas are grossly underpaid and undervalued for these intricate skills. This only causes more bitterness and frustration as they attempt to read their customers minds, create personalized, handcrafted beverages, and navigate the crowds of zombie-like people dying for their daily caffeine fix on their way to work and school--all before 8 am.
In the 20/20 interview, the baristas spoke of decaffeinating rude people's coffee, or adding extra charges to their drinks. I understand the desire to do these things--it's extremely tempting sometimes! As anyone who has ever worked in customer service will tell you, people can be downright nasty. It can be very disheartening, especially for those of us with the determined Anne Frank-attitude to see the good in humanity.
Thankfully, there are plenty of really wonderful people we encounter every day too! These wonderful souls of grace who very clearly recognize us not as machines but as humans like themselves, are often what get us through the seemingly never-ending days.
I actually started writing a coffee shop musical back in college, based on my experiences. It was a sad little story line, but this video beautifully portrays (*minus the bit of vulgarity*) the plight of the modern barista, set to a familiar musical:
What stuck out to me most was their question "When will I be redeemed?"
Well, here's what I've learned: they have already been redeemed. We all have. It's a matter of accepting the sacrifice that paid our way out of this "hell" we're living.
We can't always change our situation (especially in this economy) and land our dream jobs right out of college (or even four years out of college), and in the meantime, we have to pay rent somehow. We can't change how people act towards us, but we can change how we act toward them. Instead of being the pretentious coffee know-it-alls we are stereotyped to be, we can adopt a servant's heart.
We can serve coffee with genuine joy and love. We can be kind even to the rudest customers (you never know what horrible experiences someone might be going through!). We can swallow our own opinions of what makes a good coffee and instead maintain the attitude that everyone has different tastes.
I have worked in coffee for 6 years, which is 4 more than I ever anticipated (trust me, I never anticipated being in management, but here I am). As a whole, I have loved my experiences. I love the people that I've met, the skills and knowledge that I've gained, the free coffee I've been allowed to drink, and even the work itself. It's fun! Some days I look around in gratitude and shake my head in wonder thinking, "They actually pay me to do this!"
Other days though, I shake my head thinking, "There is not enough money in the world. . ." I find myself struggling through the daily grind to be happy and nice to people when I just want to sit in a corner and be angry and frustrated. I get so tired (the kind of tired that is beyond caffeine's reach) of being outgoing (I'm an extreme introvert) on a daily basis and being up for hours before the sun. It's these days that make me ask the question: what am I even doing here?
What I have come to understand through it all, is that I am exactly where I am supposed to be. In all my vain attempts to get out, I still sought God's will for my life. My ultimate goal, after all, is not a successful career, but holiness. God gave me glimpses of what may lay ahead, and with those glimpses, reminders that as much as I want to be, I am not ready for the next step.
Even though I have days where I curse the ground I work on (by the way, we actually call the ground we work on the IBG, because we believe our bar was built on an Indian burial ground), and want to cry at the sad state of humanity, and then I spill brown mocha powder all over my black pants, I believe it is all part of the process. It is part of growing up, yes, but most importantly, a part of being humbled, of dying to myself.
If we are to be redeemed, we must first die to ourselves, so that we may rise again with Christ:
And he said to all, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. [Luke 9: 23-24)
The particular slow and painful death God has chosen for me just happens to be death by mocha.
I still fail and fall frequently, but I am reminded over and over again of His redeeming love, mercy, and faithfulness. I encourage you, wherever you are, to accept your form of "death" as the grace to participate in the fullness of your redemption. It's all we can do, really.
[*Disclaimer* The title of this post is also the title of a book by C.S. Lewis that I have neither read nor know much about. I just like the way it sounds.]
Exactly two years ago today I left my college town as a post-grad nomad. . .I had big dreams in my heart as I drove away from that smelly old mining town rusting along the Ohio River. I can tell you that none of those dreams came true, and the funny thing that I never even thought I would say is, I'm so thankful they didn't.
After eighteen years as a student who (NerdAlert) loved school, I'm still just not really sure what else to do, other than make coffee. When they asked me what I wanted to be when I grow up, I said I wanted to be a ballerina (I never took a single lesson) or an actress (I have terrible stage fright, and though I find theater fun, I never found it very fulfilling) or the president (but only so I could outlaw abortion and then hang out in the White House).
My concept of reality wasn't very realistic. Still isn't, actually. If you had told me then that I would be where I am today, though. . .I don't know what I would have done, but I'm glad you didn't. It's been a struggle to get here, but I've enjoyed watching the mystery unfold. I can't say that I wouldn't like to change a few things, but without those particular causes for suffering, I wouldn't have also found a particular cause for joy.
Reality has a way of checking itself, and it seems to do this in waves for me. Often when I find my brain about to explode from the pressure of it all, I am surprised by this unique joy (a happiness I really never thought I could feel), and all the overwhelming thoughts weighing me down lose their heaviness. They take on color and fire and become like rainbow confetti. Then I welcome the explosion, because that means it's time to party.
