Below Average Joe

Java, jitter juice, cuppa joe, morning mud, wakey juice…all names for that sweet elixir of morning life, coffee.

I’m sure in some etiquette guide from the 50’s, the ability to make a perfect cup of coffee is the sign of a successful hostess, but if that is the only criteria I fear I’m doomed to fail miserably.

I could blame the way I was raised—the only coffee ever prepared in our house was for the occasional guests from out of town that stayed overnight. Even then, the most likely scenarios included a jar of instant Folgers crystals or the old (or maybe I’m just remembering it in 80’s Technicolor), tiny four-cupper coffee maker which depended on multiple miracles for the potential of coffee grounds or filters in the house. In fact, I remember the presence of coffee more frequently at church potlucks. I discovered quickly that I didn’t like it black, but no matter how much sugar I poured into it, or that powdered white product that claims to be something that used to be dairy-related, it didn’t seem to improve it beyond a weak, bitter brew that never held any interest for me.

The coffee aisle in the grocery store though…now, THAT was as far on the other end of the spectrum as you could get. Whenever we shopped as a family, I loved darting into that aisle and pausing in awe next to those plastic dispenser bins with a vast array of coffee beans just waiting to be ground. I’d close my eyes and take the deepest breath I could possibly manage, trying to inhale the earthy smell all the way to my toes. The aroma sings a siren song full of promise—alluring and delicious-- calling to passersby with the rich smell of Arabian blends or South American specialties. I was confounded by the incredible difference between that delicious collection of smells and the horrible liquid that had been all I’d ever experienced of coffee.

During the 2nd semester of my freshman year of college, I met Ambassador Liz. Although she never stood on the formality of her title and insisted I just call her Liz, she was an enthusiastic representative of her homeland and patiently opened my eyes to the wonder of her origins, Coffee Land (aka Seattle). As far as I know, at the time she was the only person in the girls dorm to have an espresso machine in her room, and she used it all the time! She let me try sips of her different concoctions, and opened my eyes to the potential of flavored liquid creamers. Next, she shifted my interest to raspberry white chocolate mocha frappuccinos. My, that was a nice phase. But gradually I shifted to vanilla lattes, and now my favorite toffee nut lattes, or iced toffee nut lattes without ice. If you’ll notice, those last 4 are all sourced out of Starbucks, which I really should just buy stock in so at least I’d be paying myself back whenever I made purchases there.

I’ve tried to make coffee at home, but the variations confound me. First, there are multiple tools to choose from for brewing it—percolator, French press, filter drip, espresso machine, stovetop espresso, etc. And of the most common drip machines, you can also choose a paper filter (for ease of cleaning) or gold filter (so the most flavorful oils don’t get filtered out by the paper). Next, brand and flavor of bean can vary greatly, as there are different philosophies about the length of time a bean should be roasted to produce ideal flavor (has everyone in the world ever agreed on the categorization of “ideal” for ANYTHING?). After that landmine, choosing how fine the bean should be ground is dependent on the brewing method--the faster the brew (such as espresso), the smaller the beans must be ground. Separate but also dependent on the brewing method, you have to choose the ratio of grounds to water for brewing. Once you finally managed to perform alchemy and get some form of the black gold into your cup (mug, traveler’s mug, or thermos anyone?), then comes the challenge of balancing the strength of the brew with some variation of creamer, half & half and sugar.

I can’t even play Lemonade Tycoon without finding a walkthrough that outlines the recipe for the perfect cup. And for that game, you only have to balance lemons, sugar and water. But how do you know if a cup needs 1 lemon, 2 sugars? Or 2 lemons, 4 sugars? Or 4 lemons, 1 sugar? Throw in 7 variables, and I still haven’t hit on quite the right combination. Maybe in 5 years I’ll be able to get it down.

In the meantime, if anyone wants to come visit me in Florida, I can promise there are no Folgers crystals in my apartment, and I know where the 5 closest Starbucks are, so you don’t have to be a test subject in my impromptu coffee lab.

This might take a while...

I think in my heart I’ve lost something for a few years.

Although I could feel the void of its absence, I could not discover its name. And as time has passed and life has proceeded, the lack of it stretched quickly to my mouth, or I suppose in this case to my blog, as the void muffled the things I desired to say or share.

I used to post here pretty regularly, and I also dearly enjoy reading my friends’ blogs and keeping up on events in their lives. When I read posts of their daily activities or quirky observations about life, it almost feels like I’m still chatting with them in the hallways of my college dorm, or catching up in band or over lunch in high school. Although our communications weren’t directly to each other, simply knowing the details from their day, repeated over time, gave me a sense of connection with them as close as sharing a cup of coffee with someone face to face.

When my father passed away almost two years ago, it was a startling exclamation point in the path of my life. My innate human response is to induce a measure of control in a situation where I feel that I have none, and in the months prior to that God had been teaching me to react to things not with hyper-control (or an attempt at it), but to allow Him to lead the way and let my steps fall where they may. I think I was diligently trying to do that, but after the death of a loved one there is such a gaping piece of the heart that is raw and tender and I figuratively hunched my shoulders around it, trying to protect it. Less than 6 months later, Grandma Jane passed away. Although much less of a surprise due to her advanced years and failing health for many years, I didn’t quite know how to process it. Some elusive part of my brain whispered that I had barely gotten to see her even once a year for the past decade, so I really didn’t have the right to feel a sense of loss at her passing. But my heart disagreed and the figurative shoulders protecting it hunched further inward, as if to guard against additional blows. Instead of protection, they became a cage that I couldn’t fight through.

Increasingly, I found myself having things I wanted to share but suddenly not knowing how or what to say. And I don’t mean big revelations or impactful insights, just the daily banter of keeping up with friends. Yet suddenly I felt muffled or gagged and simply unable to reach out with even the mundane. The more time that passed, the more sturdy the withholding cage felt, and yet at the same time it was so nebulous that I couldn’t even define it, let alone resolve it.

In the meantime I would still stay in touch by phone with my family and some of my close friends, but for a time even that was a stuttering step. With those of whom I stayed in regular contact, the feeling passed, but for some reason I couldn’t return to my blog. The vast, unnamed, undefined block was still there.

Today I cried in church.

Now, I don’t normally consider myself a “crier.” In the distant past, it was only at the most emotional movies (My Girl, anyone?) that I’d get a flicker of the eyelid, but God’s been working on that in my heart, too. He’s blessed me with being in a church where the preaching challenges me and digs deep into corners of my mind and heart that perhaps lay unlit before.
This morning’s sermon was titled “Spiritual Adultery” and was based out of Jeremiah 2. On the way to church this morning God had been working on my heart related to pride. Something a friend had exclaimed over the day before had been running heavily through my mind and convicted me of using sarcasm for humor at the expense of others. So as the entire chapter of Scripture was being read aloud, my mind saw nothing initially to convict me, but prayers of abasement and humility before God were so fresh in my mind that I settled down to listen intently anyway—and what a blessing that I did!

Although I can’t restate the entire sermon for you, I’ll try to share the aspect that touched me so much today. Although some of the imagery used in v. 20-25 is not usually a part of “polite conversation,” it is part of a theme that God uses throughout the Bible of likening God to a groom and us (sometimes Israel, sometimes believers) as a bride. Sometimes it is held up as a loving, cherished relationship, and sometimes described as adulterous, with the bride being extravagantly unfaithful and insatiable in her drive to fill her desires from every source except her rightful husband. With Israel it was turning to idols to worship instead of their true God. But an idol can be anything else where you go to find your meaning, worth and sufficiency.

I’ve been very blessed to come from a home where I learned that faithfulness and integrity are priceless virtues. With such a belief held deeply in my core, it is a great aversion to me to even THINK about cheating—on taxes, on music downloads (although there was a wee time in college before I understood Napster as “cheating”), on the job, or in a relationship—because it would be cheating against God not just man (Psalm 51). But the preacher didn’t stop there. The adultery wasn’t a light-switch moment in Israel’s history. Nor is it that way in a romantic relationship (or so I’ve learned from various speakers over the years, and from the occasional Oprah show that I don’t entirely disagree with). It usually starts with a lack of intimacy. In Jeremiah 2:6-8, God’s not saying they couldn’t find Him, but that they didn’t even remember Him. One reason God uses a marriage to symbolize our relationship with Him is because of the depth of intimacy He desires. For newlyweds (such as verse 2), they’re so wrapped up in each other and in exploring the newfound depths of their relationship that sometimes as an observer you almost want roll your eyes at their involvement in each other, but there is no doubt that there is an intimacy and an enraptured state that they have toward each other. That’s what God wants with us.

This picture of deep, emphatic intimacy made me pause abruptly. So often when reading a Scripture passage like this, I have checked off my list of mental responsibilities and found myself sufficient in them. In thinking of myself as a spiritual bride, I had not committed spiritual adultery and therefore hadn’t seen any condemnation to myself on the page. But is adultery really the only pitfall of a marriage? Certainly not! With too many examples around us to count, we see marriages of convenience where a wife lives as a trophy whose primary mission is to spend the wealth of her husband as effusively as possible. Or a heartbreakingly lopsided marriage where only one person is interested in taking up the mantle of spiritual leadership for the children. Or a marriage which long ago dissolved from being a loving union and now withers away under years of henpecking and arguing, with no hope for change. Or a marriage which was held hostage by unfaithfulness and a lack of trust leaves it without a bridge to span the chasm. Or a marriage which drifts into a perfunctory life of roommates, even though there is no hostility there. The reasons and paths are varied, but all have a gaping void of intimacy.

I have seen variations on these themes over time, and my mind has boggled trying to comprehend the death of hope that would seem apparent to me in some of these people. I chalk up some of that to the hubris of the young and unmarried, but in not understanding it, my heart also aches for the people who used to be—the youths that came to these marriages thinking they would have the flawless dream stretching before them of straight roads, smooth sailing, and amenable companionship along the way, but instead somewhere along the way something broke and was not repaired, strained and was not relieved, or was feared and not resolved. The intimacy which they initially shared was somehow lost.

Although I cannot presume to know the thoughts of others’ hearts, God does, and he can see mine too. Is it really enough to simply not be unfaithful? Both in my spiritual and physical life, I don’t want to have a marriage of simply faithfulness. I want to have a marriage of intimacy. I shudder to think of a hypothetical future where I coexist with a husband but don’t share an emotional and physical connection on a regular basis, only surviving as passing ships in the night. To me, that is the death of hope.

But intimacy is such a fragile flower, as evidenced by what I can remember of junior high. Starting teenage life is so rough. It seemed that every moment of junior high and high school was one of feeling self conscious. Learning to deepen friendships is tricky because it requires being vulnerable. You risk it by opening up more of yourself to each other, and if you get burned or ridiculed, you shy away and learn to protect yourself from that ever happening again. Over time as you grow up, you learn how to protect yourself or not take things to heart, but you also learn who to protect yourself from or who not to open your heart to. Hopefully the flip side of that is finding that rare gem of a friend that you CAN open your heart to and find emotional intimacy and spiritual exhortation and hopefully acquire the blessing described in Proverbs 27:17—a friendship in which you can sharpen each other.

All of this culminated in my mind in that abrupt pause of contemplating emphatic intimacy. It can be lost in a friendship or marriage by closing part of your heart off, ostensibly for protection, but ultimately creating distance. When covered with a scar of self protection or a cage of figurative hunched shoulders, a heart simply can’t be tender and intimate. It can’t both keep itself aloof and reach out at the same time—one or the other has to win.

Ever since my dad and Grandma Jane passed away, I’ve felt the void of intimacy-through-vulnerability. I couldn’t name it, but every time the phone rang at an odd hour, especially if it was a family member calling, my heart would seize up with the instant thought that something had happened to my mom. For a while I was thinking about moving back to Minnesota just so I’d be there for the indeterminate future, in case the big “something” happened. But by constantly holding my breath in case something happened, I was unable to relax into that state of being vulnerable. While not being able to name it, I was able to force through the fear for family and some friends, since I unconsciously felt less risk in being vulnerable with them.

And along the way God has kept gently pushing me toward deeper intimacy with Himself and those around me. In the past year I’ve had some Christian friendships at work blossom into ever deepening levels, and I’ve had the blessing of completing a Bible study titled A Woman’s Heart: God’s Dwelling Place and am just starting a new one on Daniel. Each time that I study through something and am touched by the intimacy of God opening the Word to me, I cry then too. I’ve also been dating a wonderful man, Stephen, for not quite a year, and it’s the first romantic relationship I’ve been in where I've felt free to be open and vulnerable. Partly this is due to the remarkable heart of the man, and I must attribute a large part to God leading our lives together at this time. Stephen has taken remarkable care of the state of my heart, and the few times that fear and insecurity whisper to me to distance myself or protect myself, I’ve gotten very timely nudges from the Holy Spirit to bridge the gap and not allow any distance to accumulate. (Although I must footnote that this process has involved quite a bit of physical distance, with Stephen being in Fort Worth for the better part of the beginning of our relationship, and although he moved back to Orlando in June, he’s currently traveling for over a month as well for work…23 days and counting until he gets back!)

God has blessed me by encouraging me to regain vulnerability, and I hope to do so as well with my friends that I “keep up with” via blog. I’ve missed you and simply didn’t know how to begin reaching out again, but I don’t want any more distance to grow by me being stagnant, so here I come (but this might take a while).
And I promise not to post something this long again for at least a week :)

Hugs to all…
Love,
Shannon