The Unbroken Coffee Cup – Postscript to Broken Coffee Cup Series
This posting is a postscript to the Broken Coffee Cup Series. And here, the featured photo is the green-rimmed coffee cup, unbroken, intact, and whole, the twin of the broken blue cup, both given to me as gifts at the same time by dear long-time friends from church. The broken coffee cup series originally started as a fairly simple letter – “simple” with me, however, always being a very plastic concept – to just these two friends, with the sole intention of making right a terribly bungled explanation on my part of the thoughts my accidently breaking the cup generated. Each of my three “simple” written letter attempts grew successively in length, and eventually morphed in time into three long complex postings, as I understood with more clarity the true issues and actions breaking and rupturing the fellowship I once had within Grace Community Church (GCC) and my friends therein. This postscript is a singular posting.
I still use the green trimmed, happily unbroken cup for coffee on some mornings, and I use it here within this posting, not as a metaphor, but more just for the idea of completeness and wholeness now going forward. For with writing the Broken Cup series and again immersing myself back into all the confusions and griefs over those years, new understandings and insights and, in places, closure, emerged. For by finally just speaking openly and truthfully, and as completely and precisely as I am capable, I was able to more thoughtfully consider – but at times with this process, also reliving and feeling again – the mental, emotional, and spiritual impact upon me and my relationship with my friends, in writing letters to the church with weighty spiritual concerns over eight years, with no response or invitation to engage in dialogue.
And as the pose of the rooster on the green cup suggests, this posting is a pause, a pondering looking backwards, one last contemplation of the landscape of the past, to make sure that I have communicated all I was led to see and learn and understand, because now I turn from this part of my past and step into a new geography with a different landscape and new horizons prepared for me by the Lord. And whether it be a three day or a three decade journey or anything in between, this is the path I am now on, with sign posts and mileage signs nowhere in sight except two very near, one with the name of the pathway – “Trust in the Lord Road” – and the second, “Caution, Bumps Ahead”
I am actually thankful for accidently breaking the coffee cup and my botched and clumsy attempt to expound on my thoughts concerning it, for writing the series has produced multiple good in my life, and now hopefully good also in the lives of others, especially my friends. I do not think, nor would I want, nor is it even possible, that my relationship and friendship with any one specific friend could or should be the same as before. For starters, we were different to begin with. Moreover, the many changes and events that have surrounded and crowded us over the last two and a half years have also affected us all differently. In addition, by pursuing different goals and lives, and being on different paths, either by choice or by default, we are all truly not the same individuals as when there was a parting between us, for whatever reason or duration.
However, this does not mean that people, who are now different, cannot meet again as different persons. For now in meeting, we can speak of the different ways and paths we now walk. We can arrange to meet around new and different schedules, and to sit now in a different café, or Starbucks, and share a cup of coffee in cups different than those from before. And in different cafés, we can speak of our different lives, minds, and hearts, with different words and thoughts, from which we can now learn from the other. For perhaps the most significant differences reside inherently deep within our hearts and minds. And yet the dialogue of now different people, both mutually open to each other, can begin to create, out of that which was once broken and useless in original purpose, new friendships, new lives, a strengthened fellowship, with a renewed sense of the God-endowed value and worth of the other and ourselves, which can now be something newer and brighter with more light, and at its core, the vision of our eternity.
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When I would talk to many of my friends at GCC, especially when I was in the process of leaving the church, when appropriate or natural, I would touch upon some of the topics expressed in my letters, though the times of actually being with my friends became few during the height of the pandemic. And when I shared that I was leaving or had left the church, the two issues, the two questions, I always asked, or tried to ask or bring up, was did they have an intimate relationship with Jesus characterized by intimate daily prayer, and did they commit their day to the Lord, and seek from Him, the grace and empowerment to walk closely moment by moment throughout the day with and under the gentle guidance of the Holy Spirit. When I asked these questions, my friends, for the most part, just looked at me blankly, for after all these years at church, these questions just did not compute.
These discussions, and all the mantras I heard being repeated that I covered in Part 3 of the Broken Coffee Cup series, coupled with the depth of the anguish, caused, at times, among some of my friends by their lack of truly understanding the very real infinite and intimate love of God in their lives, have helped form my prayers for them and even myself. For the lives of many of my friends expressed a lack of the joy of living in the experience of the presence of Christ. And some were also deeply burdened by doubts and anxieties, and held by chains forged with links of self-inflicted and induced fears.
Some friends, because of their doubts and misconceptions of God, also avoid real prayer and are greatly hesitant in bringing the true burdens of their lives and hearts to Christ. Part of this hesitancy is because of an absorbed deep-seated fear, that God is primarily a God who is wrathful towards sin and every human issue of brokenness, trauma, hurt, or confusion and fear in their lives. And those burdened with such thoughts, also, at times, harbor hidden feelings that it is best to keep a safe distance from God. They are cautious in prayer because they are unsure of the measure of God’s response if they would openly expose deep issues and anxieties in their lives before Him, because then they would also expose the terrible fact that they are not really the picture-perfect church-created image of what a Christian needs to appear to be.
Fear then sometimes keeps some away from Christ and the open-arm grace, compassion, and care His love yearns to extend to us even with our problems and doubts. All these burdens of my friends, and the anxieties and issues with which I have also struggled with over the years, the Lord has also used in His goodness to shape my thoughts and prayers, ever drawing me closer in the deepening knowledge of His love, and the strength and wisdom of His care and faithfulness.
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Prayers for my friends:
I pray that my friends will pray for and seek an intimate prayer life with Jesus as the bedrock foundation of their spiritual life, bringing everything and anything to the Lord in faith and trust, knowing that He has promised to hear and answer all our prayers. To develop daily habits of prayer which will transform their lives into a life of prayer in the constant presence of Jesus. To make Jesus again the center and focus of their faith and allegiance.
I pray that my friends and others will seek and pray for a close walk with the Holy Spirit, to learn to commit their day to the Lord and ask the Holy Spirit for direction throughout the day. To ask for the grace to follow the guidance of the Holy Spirit and not unthinkingly only the directions and opinions of men.
I pray for my friends that they will bring before the Lord all things and ask for the grace and wisdom to think, to begin to think critically. To not just accept, believe, and repeat the things they are told or hear on politics, social issues, or any issue dealing with or touching upon how we are to think of or act towards any group of persons. To rely upon the wisdom and heart of Christ and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit in all of their dealings with others, so that they witness of the love and goodness of Christ in their attitudes, words, and actions in every interaction with every person. To bring before the Lord all the issues stemming from being taught an “us/them” theology/ideology and overall approach to life and others.
I pray that daily we all would seek from the Lord the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom of how we can fulfill the first great commandment of truly loving God with our whole heart, mind, and soul to the extent that we can honestly say that we do love God.
I pray that daily we all would seek from the Lord the knowledge, understanding, and wisdom of how we can fulfill the second great commandment of loving our neighbor as ourselves. That through the grace of the Lord, and the work of the Holy Spirit, that the love of our neighbor would be made instinctual in our every encounter – even with those the Lord brings just across the view from our path of the day for just a moment or two – and that the love of Christ and the hope of the gospel would be expressed within our every thought, word, and deed.
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As I was writing the Broken Coffee Cup series, and then working through this posting, I came to understand that what I was actually writing was a witness, a witness to what I saw, heard, observed, and experienced of the church’s prolonged, developing, and eventual headlong involvement and intermeshing with the American conservative political movement. All this culminating with the 2020 election campaigns and the painful to behold outright idolatrous support and acclaim for the ex-president, a support and secret adulation that continues even now.
I also realized that all the letters I wrote to the church leaders before I withdrew my membership are also in a real sense a witness. I never thought of them or intended them to be as such, as I wrote them, as they were always “family” letters to me, written to pastors and elders I was involved and engaged with, but, yes, they are now also part of the witness of what occurred at the church during all these troubled years. And this is good in the sense that with the letters, there is at least something that others can read, think through, digest, and evaluate, that records the confusion and the growing sin and hypocrisy of all those years. For without witness, without truth, only the lies and the fabrications of reality remain. And the sins and transgressions, or a silence surrounding them, is not a legacy I would want to be involved with, or leave in my writings, or have as any part of my life work.
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It has taken a lot of time and mental and emotional energy to write this postscript to the Broken Coffee Cup series. And, now that I am finished, I sit quietly for a moment to consider what I have accomplished. My primary thought is as it is with anything that I write – I never know what I have accomplished for others, until I hear words that echo what my writings have produced or placed within them.
For it is the emotional response that my ears are truly attuned to, the response of the heart and soul, the depths of one’s being, that feeds and nurtures the mind. So when I have written from the heart for the heart, what I hope to accomplish for others is that I have been able to touch their heart, mind, and soul – the entire person – especially here when I have written of what I consider to be of the highest spiritual importance – one’s love of God and neighbor.
What I have accomplished for myself, the Lord will continue to unfold.
And even though I know that with this posting the chapter of my life with GCC is closing, I will continue to pray for the church’s leaders as well as for all the friends and close acquaintances I have that still attend the church. The chapter with friends is not closed.
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And the last word:
Micah 6:8
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
And the last postscript:
Jeremiah 9:23-24
23 Thus says the Lord, “Let not a wise man boast of his wisdom, and let not the mighty man boast of his might, let not a rich man boast of his riches: 24 but let him who boasts boast of this, that he understands and knows Me, that I am the Lord who exercises lovingkindness, justice and righteousness on earth; for I delight in these things,” declares the Lord.
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I have a 4 set of these coffee cups. Given to me from my dad after he passed away I was able to keep those cups I loved so much. I miss my dad and those cups are a simple reminder of my precious dad. I love reading your work. Thank you for the inspiration. Sincerely, Cathy