* I wrote this for our church family, but maybe lots of you out there like coffee and will find this a neat way to help our cause.
This is a really cool opportunity. This small company in South Carolina is going to give 50% of their profit in the month of February to our Haitian-focused efforts through Global Grace. Now, many of you are quite satisfied with counterfeit coffee (i.e. Folgers et. al.) and that is your right! We live in a free country. There is no spiritual superiority to those who have a more sophisticated understanding of coffee. In fact, those of us who have a more sophisticated palate often succumb to pride, condescension, and down-right snobbiness. It is also easy to become sectarian and cliquish when you know you’re so much better than everyone else. Thankfully, our church is very ecumenical and diverse in the area of hot beverage, but the propensity of coffee connoisseurs to abuse coffee by over-indulgence should not deter any of us from enjoying fine coffee. Nor should we overreact to their hoity-toity superiority complex by belligerently persisting in our Hills-Bros.-been-on-the-shelf-six-years, cheap-coffee-maker, tepid brown-water-sludge-people-pass-off-as-coffee-on-the-ignorant-masses just to prove our humility.
Many people insist that coffee is coffee and that while they appreciate fresh roasted coffee they prefer to save the money by drinking a brown fluid made from dusty grounds that have been in a plastic container for years. This makes about as much sense as opting to eat dog food because it’s so much cheaper than real food. I’m not saying that this is my personal opinion. Please understand. That kind of snootiness is unbecoming of a pastor. I’m merely trying to express the thoughts of people who are in the know. Or at least how I imagine they would be thinking.
Well, this is a good month to treat one’s self to better coffee. And even if you don’t drink coffee you could purchase some for a coffee-loving friend. Believe it or not, there are some countries in the world that have a tradition of buying coffee for their pastor during what they call, “Buy Coffee for the Pastor Month.” Coincidentally, it happens to be in February. Now, clearly I do not think we have to adapt the traditions of other cultures. My point is merely to suggest that there many reasons one could buy coffee besides for one’s own pleasure.
Another reason is that half the profit will go to a worthy cause.
Filed under: Global Grace, Inc. | Comments Off
