Psalm 119:14-16
In the way of your testimonies, I delight as much as in all riches. I will meditate on your precepts and fix my eyes on your ways. I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.
Caffeine has often been called the Christian drug for a good reason. Its addiction is relatively harmless, causing only migraines rather than kidney failure. Now that I have a newborn baby, I find myself turning to the beverage often when I feel like I can’t go on. I guzzle cups coffee like an old Winnebago with three flat tires, hardly tasting the bittersweet liquid. As a mother, I pretty much function by the power of this elixir, but this milky, surgery mixture I prefer is nothing compared to what I grew up with.
My mother was Cuban, and Cuban coffee resembles used motor oil. You drink it in shot glasses as slowly as possible if you don’t want to knock yourself out. Once your teeth stop chattering, your eyes stop shaking, and you recover your melted internal organs, the beverage does actually taste good.
It’s kind of like expresso with a sassy attitude. While expresso is like a shot in the head, Cuban coffee is like a mule kick in the face. People mix up the two because they are both served in tiny cups, but the syrupy texture of Cuban coffee is not the same thing as expresso’s black liquid to anyone who has tasted the two. They aren’t even made the same way. While espresso is made in a shiny high-cultured machine perfected by experience and science, Cuban coffee is made in a dilapidated kettle held together with duct tape, bubble gum, and caffeinated sentimentality.
My grandfather would drink a massive thermos of this stuff at his job as a carpenter. I used to watch my grandmother make the beverage for him by packing down Columbian dark roasted coffee in a tiny metal cup that attached to this oddly elongated kettle that you heat on a stove top. I still own one of these devices and make some Cuban coffee when I feel daring enough to drink it.
So, another word, I grew up in a coffee culture watching old men drink their tiny cups while sitting on plastic chairs watching the grass grow and speculating on the weather. It’s such a high energy drink for such a low energy activity, yet this is what the coffee cultures around the world does with their caffeinated beverage. They sit and ponder. It’s the cafes of the world that birthed the philosophers who have shaken up governments and empires. Charles II tried to ban cafes as places that encouraged revolutionary thoughts. They were once dubbed “penny universities” and was a social leveler. John Locke wrote in the cafes of Holland his works against the divine right of kings. It is only recently that we have leaned on coffee for energy to make it through our fast pace life.
My ideal would be to make a cup of coffee, Cuban or American, and sit next to a window with my Bible and a journal just to speculate on the meaning of life for an hour or two. My reality is quickly brewing the biggest cup of coffee I can manage and stealing sips of it between diaper changes, laundry, errands, and phone calls. It isn’t unusual for my husband to find a half drunk cup of coffee in some random place in the house (linen closet anyone?). Whenever I come across my cold cup, I grab a gulp and shift it to some new odd location of which I may or may have any recollection five minutes later.
How often do we treat our spiritual walk like a cup of coffee? I am certainly guilty of it. I sit down to speed through my devotions looking for the feel-good verses to give me the emotional pick-me-up that I need. I am pretty sure I have done a devotional reading of Psalm 117 at least once a year, but I still don’t have that short chapter memorized. It’s because I don’t sit long enough to taste it.
Even church stopped being my warm cup of coffee to ponder over and became my shot of caffeine to give me an emotional boost. I often end up attending church events because they encourage me and inspire me to another day of action. Between getting two kids ready for church and making sure that I have packed for every possible crisis that could potentially occur in the short time we are away from the house, I haven’t had time to emotionally calm my soul down until we are collecting communion. I heard the message and gulped it all down, ready to rush off to my next task as soon as church is done.
In our hurried life going from one task to another, how often are we able to sit down a to sip the scriptures, especially the dark, complicated kick-you-in-the-seat-of-the pants stuff. I see parts of the Bible – the parts we skip over, like passages in the Old Testament, such as the prophets – as the Cuban coffee of my spiritual life (Psalm 77:10-12). Just small amounts of it sets my head spinning and my teeth chattering, yet there is something delicious there, something powerful that changes our lives (Joshua 1:8).
You might say, “I don’t have time for that! At least, I depend on the Bible and the church.”
True, but it isn’t good enough when life gets hard (Psalm 119:147). It’s fine for a season, but not as a lifestyle (Psalm 1:2). The point of the philosophers in the cafes was for them to step out of the rat-race of life and understand what it was all about (Psalm 119:97-99). The sitting and pondering help them wonder if there might be a better way to live (Phil. 1:8). When we ponder scripture, we are storing it away in our hearts for the difficult days, the days in which our world turns upside down and we need to know instantly what God says about it (Psalm 119:105). His words does feel good in the moment, but they are even better at rescuing us when we don’t know what to do (Psalm 4:20-22). The awakening energy of coffee-fueled the mind to think rather than the body to action, so does the scriptures (Psalm 49:3).
When we say that the Bible has all the answers, it is really about the more significant questions of life (Psalm 1). The hard questions and issues require us to stop and ponder. I encourage you, and myself as well, to make a little time to sit and savor God’s word (Psalm 19:14). To taste them and digest them (Psalm 34:8, Psalm 119:103). Find a moment to try the hard stuff too, perhaps not every day, but let it awaken your mind to think and wonder (Psalm 119:89). You may not get everything you can from a passage but have patience. There is salvation at the bottom of that coffee cup (Psalm 119:81).
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