A cup of coffee...

While enjoying a cup of coffee today, something occurred to me about American Christianity. Ok see if you can follow how this all unfolded in my brain…

Let me begin by saying that cups here are really small. They’re like half the size of a cup we would use in the US. You order a coffee or a cup of tea, and they hand you this teeny tiny little mug. I like it because holding it in my hand, I kinda feel like a giant! :)

First time I got a drink here last week I thought, that is so strange! But then I took a sip out of my teeny tiny cup. Wow that is strong! That is really sweet! There is a lot going on in this teeny little cup! Its like this in other cultures too… if you’ve ever had cope aceh from indonesia, or arabic coffee maybe you’ve noticed this.

The other day Casey went to the store and picked up a nice mug so we would have something to take around with us to class since we didn’t bring anything. He brings back this typical american-sized mug. Big. Probably the only one in the whole store. But every time he orders something to drink in it, they only fill it halfway. (They know it only takes a little bit to get you going because this stuff is intense!)

So here I was this morning looking into my gigantic mug only half filled with coffee. I kind of chuckled to myself, typical American! We love these huge, impressive things but there just isn’t much to them. We think “bigger is better”. It doesn’t have to be of any real quality but if you get a lot of it, hey that’s great. But all it takes in Brazil is this little, quality punch of coffee and you’re good to go. At home, you’d have to fill the cup to the top.

That’s kind of like our spiritual lives sometimes. If things look great and big on the outside, and we have some great big churches and some nice programs… if we are nice and busy doing a bunch of ministry… if we have a lot of nice Christian books filling up our bookshelves… then that’s great! Things look great!

But what if what’s going on inside the cup is sort of weak and lame? What if, in our giant cup, we had something that was unfilling, unsatifying? What if things seemed impressive, but were actually kind of watered down?

What if instead we looked sort of humble and simple on the outside, but what was on the inside had a lot of power, a lot of punch, real substance? What if we didn’t spread ourselves so thin doing all sorts of church activities, so much that we don’t have the time nor the energy to read the Word. What if our inward lives had real spiritual strength? What if our secret prayer time was more substantial than our outward prayer?

Would it be more effective? I wonder what that would look like. I wonder if the Church would be different. I wonder if I would be different.

I dunno. Something to think about I suppose.

Probably just the quality, spazzy, teeny tiny cup of Brazillian coffee talking…