Coffee Making As Spiritual Practice

I love to make the coffee at church – I go and get real half-and-half and fancy sugars. I’ll get the juice with less sugar and more anti-oxidants (super juice.) I’ll make the coffee and pray into it. And as people are standing around after church talking about the sermon or the details of their week, I peer out from the kitchen and watch my prayers get sipped up into bodies and spirit. I watch the real half-and-half delight them, hoping that they will in turn make a decadent decision in the world and go beyond what is necessary. I watch for the juice mustaches of children hoping that their blood-sugar levels will remain stable so they can share what happened in Sunday School with the adults in their lives rather than melt on the way home. I tend to these little details knowing I will not see the results. But I remain faithful to the suspicion, the hope that they have made a difference. Coffee duty is one of my cherished spiritual practices.