Tag Archives: Coffee

Mar 17 2013
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learning to live, what they are teaching me

the ground remains

the-ground-remains

The weather has finally permitted for my backyard in the evening to transform once again into a glowing outdoor room. A friend of mine and I sat around the rickety wooden table under balls of chicken wire and lights puffing our pipes for nearly three hours this evening.

In my day to day schedule, I like to pretend that I am too important, so I don’t have time for moments like these. There’s no space for propping my feet up, bringing the music outside, lighting up a cigar and laughing, talking about ideas, and wrestling with what we are learning as it is shaken and stirred with who we are becoming.

But tonight, even though as it approached I felt as though I didn’t really have time to indulge this gathering with a friend a needed to catch up with, it was in fact exactly what my mind and soul needed to find each other again.

The work is good. The meetings and projects and plans and research and people are all good, and there is progress toward good things no matter how tenuous or temporary it may be. The calendar pages are flying off the wall faster than the second hand on the clock is ticking, but I am keeping up as best I can nevertheless.

There is something quite magical, and humbling, and ultimately holy and important about stopping long enough with another on the same journey to realize that when I prop my feet up, the ground remains. I am not holding things together, but merely participating in their newness. The meetings and projects and plans and research and people are all good, and for me to be a valuable asset in the mixology, I must make the intentional effort to take time to prop my feet up with thoughtful and entertaining and humble friends. I must hear their questions and see what they are thinking. I must join them in wrestling with their own demons and delights so that I can, in the morning, put my feet back on the ground and start again.

The ground, however, remains. The tasks are still there. My momentary pause from standing on my feet to push ahead is a reminder that I am not the one holding anything together. Propping my feet up every once and a while makes the work a little more honest, a little more true, a little more humble, and a little more holy.

So cheers to the rickety wooden table in the backyard on a brisk evening under the chicken wire lights and stars with good people on the same road.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Feb 23 2013
2 Comments
learning to live, on, what they are teaching me

worth more than a lazy saturday

more-than-lazy-saturdays

I won’t lie. To all my friends with children, jobs that carry them into the weekend, life that carries them over the edge…I wont lie. I usually sleep in on Saturdays. If I’m in town, which is becoming less and less, I don’t think twice about the thrill of sleeping in till nine or ten on Saturday mornings, waking up then only because the dogs begin to insist on it. And I wont lie that most Saturday mornings it’s the perfect thing for me to do.

Be jealous, if you wish.

Today, however, is worth more jealousy than sleeping-in-Saturdays.

This morning at eight I’m ringing the doorbell to meet for a few hours and discuss the art of counseling, to be given encouragement in y wise steps and wisdom in my ignorant steps. And coffee. To be given coffee at eight in the morning since I usually sleep in on Saturday mornings. For two and a half hours beginning at eight in the morning there is discussion over what it means to listen well, to practice well, to watch well and to craft well. Counseling is, as I’m learning, more the art of listening for what the person speaking has known all along but can’t hear himself say, can’t hear herself know. until someone shines it back on them, both sides becoming changed. This morning at eight in the morning, cup of coffee soon to be in hand, I’m ringing the doorbell ready to discuss the art and privilege of therapy.

This morning at ten-thirty, or a few minutes late because the first conversation went long…but we knew that it would…I find myself walking through another door to another meeting. I find myself, new cup of coffee in hand sitting around a huge kitchen table with people I know and people I don’t know. I find myself sitting with people who share, above all, a heart not for names or labels or agendas but a heart for the kingdom and all it involves. I find myself sitting, a little late for a ten-thirty meeting, around a table with people who have won my respect and people who quickly earned it talking big and thinking hard and dreaming wide about what it means for business and food and health and poverty and community to get smushed together in one hopeful spot. Passing the brownies, the hope of a community sitting around tables together having a party as we were this morning. This morning a few minutes after ten-thirty I find myself in the middle of a moment I wont soon forget because a little piece of kingdom come happened around that table this morning while brownies were being passed.

And at twelve forty-five I find myself sitting across the booth from a good friend for late lunch. Laughter and hats and glasses and jeans because it’s Saturday morning after all. The questions thrown out over salads and salmon about what it might mean to follow Jesus beyond harmful clichés or ceramic crosses and into the streets and the cubicles and the living rooms where vengeance is king and jealousy rages and a feeling like maybe we’re a little behind pushes fast and furious into our hearts. Passing the crackers and stacking the napkins, questions thrown out about where we went wrong or where we went right and how we might learn to tell the difference between the two, how we might assume there’s a difference at all. Back to our cars and back to our homes for errands and work and a little time for play, because it’s Saturday afternoon of course.

And then in the evening, a last minute text. Dinner around the table, prepared as we chat. Children run wildly with giggles and stories and hopeful surprises of what it mean to see their eyes and takes on the world. Sitting down in those familiar seats we find ourselves between laughter and tears because so much is known and so much has been seen. Together. There’s no catching up so only the present is told: where we are, what we wonder and what we all hope. Sweats and pullovers, secrets unhidden, because after all it’s a lazy Saturday evening dinner.

And so most Saturdays I don’t think twice, when I can, to sleep late and give thanks that I have the weekend. But today, in the hustle and the few minutes late, I give thanks that I’m surrounded by people pushing well and pushing hard and pushing often into the thin space where we’ve been taught to pray and taught what it means for his kingdom to come and his will to be done on this dusty earth now as it is in his heaven.

djordan
Pine Tree

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Jan 07 2013
2 Comments
learning to live, social work, what they are teaching me

dinner at the coffee table

2013-01-07 20.09.31

I don’t know why it has all come together in my brain this way.

Growing up, I remember being furious that this rule was put in place, even in middle and high school, that I MUST be present at the dinner table at least three or four nights a week. If I went out after that, that was one thing. If I ate or not was another thing, but my presence at the dinner table was required three or four nights a week. (I don’t remember which, so obviously it wasn’t as traumatic as I would like to pretend.)

As with many things I now reflect back on from growing up, I hated this rule at the time, and yet now I wouldn’t trade anything for it.

And a few nights ago, I joined some incredible friends from present day around their coffee table for dinner. At our home growing up, when I was huffing and puffing about having to be home for dinner around a table, we would every now and then sit around the coffee table, the same one I now have in my den, and eat pizza and watch TV together. I remember being angry that my parents could guess what was going to happen on the TV show, and I was likely more angry about this because I wanted to be anywhere but there at the moment.

But a few nights go, legs crossed over pillows on the floor, eating while sitting around their coffee table, I found myself in a kind of time freeze. The four year old daughter of my friends was pretending to make meals or be a drummer with her metal bowls and plastic whisks, and we were eating sushi with chopsticks out of styrofoam sakura to-go boxes.

There was much that reminded me, though, of growing up. The space for imagination and casualness, and play and informality. The insistence of good food even though it was spread out across a coffee table reminded me of how much has changed, and how little has changed at the same time.

And today, I’m in a counseling session with a family who can’t pay the bills so they share a home with another family. Four parents, five children, three minimum wage jobs, exponential stress. They were sitting in my office, a mom and dad, completely undone by the situation, and parenting skills to reflect the same. As they were talking, I found myself returning to the living room coffee table a few nights ago with incredible friends learning to be good parents, a four year old playing kitchen, and myself wondering how things will be remembered ten years later.

For all of us.

And most of all, I found myself glad that someone made me sit down for dinner three or four nights a week, no matter how unbelievable and unrealistic a request it seemed at the time.

djordan
Pine Tree

 

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