GOD'S COFFEE !!!

Are you enjoying your Coffee….. a small story with a lesson..

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor.

 Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups – porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite – telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said:

“If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee. In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups… And then you began eyeing each other’s cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee;

the jobs, money and position in society are the cups.

They are just tools to hold and contain Life,

and the type of cup we have does not define nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us.”

God brews the coffee, not the cups………. Enjoy your coffee!

To elaborate further, we are bombarded everywhere we look by the trappings of Life, the coffee cups in this story.  When we turn on the television, we are told over and over that to be happy we must have this new car, that newest gadget, those most mouth-watering and fattening foods…..oh, the message may not be that blatant, but the implication is there.  Have you noticed that there seem to be more ads in magazines than there are articles?  Billboards scream at us as we travel in our cars.  Radios blare their promos more and more frequently until sometimes it is hard to find the music you are searching for.

But is that what is really important in life?  The stuff?  “What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.”  In the big scheme of history, our individual lives are like a mist, here one minute and gone the next.  So, to make our life matter, what do we do while we are here?  Do we accumulate a lot of glittery stuff, a legacy of things? Although stuff is nice, I don’t think that should be our focus.

In the end of the year cards or on Teacher Appreciation Day, the following poem is often seen -

One hundred years from now

It won’t matter What kind of car I drove

 What kind of house I lived in

How much money I had in the bank

 Nor what my clothes looked like

BUT the world may be a little better

Because I was important In the life of a child.

 The message in the poem is even larger than the teacher/child relationship.  The message, and the key to the importance of Life, is relationships.   It is a critical one!   Over the next few days, think about this topic.  Stop for a while and meditate on it.