Coffee Shop

“No man is unnecessary; no man stands alone”

—	William Ellery Channing

I love going to coffee shops and seeing two people sitting across the table from each other with basic cups of coffee and chatting lively.
It makes me wonder what’s going on in their lives, why they’re drinking coffee together. Are they a couple? Old friends starting new? An old relationship finding a new spark?

It makes me think about this.

This place we call our world.

Where we can go to a place with walls and ceiling made out of materials that came up out of the earth and have some sense of community.

"One life on this earth is all that we get, whether it is enough or not enough, and the obvious conclusion would seem to be that at the very least we are fools if we do not live it as fully and bravely and beautifully as we can." -Frederick Buechner

I want to live fully and bravely and beautifully... And I find part of that sitting in a coffee shop. Just think for a minute...Go to a coffee shop. Sit by the bar with the glass windows and look out. Look at all the people. Businessmen talking away on their cell phone trying seal the deal with his partner. Frantic workers running to catch a train. All the girls with one too many shopping bags. The two people laughing hysterically with each other next to you. The homeless man begging on the side of the street. The little boys looking around in awe at what he sees. All the couples too in love to care. Then you’ll see it - a bit of yourself in everyone. And somehow, sitting alone in a coffee shop had never felt so good.

Because even when we are alone, if we choose to look around, we notice, we are never really alone. Community. Interaction. Love. Movement. Action. Togetherness.

Are all aspects of our makeup. Aspects of humanity.

Maybe that is a spark of God in us?
After all it is God that is a community all in himself.
And he made us for more than just ourselves, right?
Perhaps there was so much more than our sin that Christ came down here for?
Maybe...
Christ came so that he would be part of humanity's community forever.

The creator became like the creation.

Your life and my life flow into each other as wave flows into wave, and unless there is peace and joy and freedom for you, there can be no real peace or joy or freedom for me. To see reality--not as we expect it to be but as it is--is to see that unless we live for each other and in and through each other, we do not really live very satisfactorily; that there can really be life only where there really is, in just this sense, love.

And then the verse that says: God is love takes a whole new meaning for me.

OF COURSE HE IS!

He came to us, to participate in this... living? This... being?

This. Life.

May we see the world as our neighbors. 
There is something in everyone that reminds us, shows us, helps us to understand... that there is something distinct that makes us human.

Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea, at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars, and they pass by themselves without wondering at all.

-St. Augustine of Hippo

"The Glory of God is a human being fully alive." -Irenaeus