The Value of a Coffee Maker

This Saturday I spent all day at God's Helping Hands, a redemptive outreach of Churches of Christ in the metro Detroit area. Over 140 volunteers served 212 families, providing food, Christmas gifts, and household items for people who find themselves with any hope of buying even the simplest of holiday gifts for their children.

This is the biggest day in the God's Helping Hands year. It is a day of light in the midst of a very dark and cold season for many of these families. Stress levels are often high, as people anxiously await the chance to "shop" for their families. In the midst of those times, I often get the chance to sit down with very emotional people and try to help them cope with some of the feelings they are experiencing, both for good and for ill. That is the blessing of being one of the few ministers who come to serve on Focus Saturdays.

Saturday, while I was carrying out an industrial carafe of hot water to make instant coffee, hot chocolate and hot tea for the Jesuses who were waiting in line, one of my co-volunteers passed me and said, "Lisa is looking for you." That is always a moment of truth. Lisa, the coordinator at GHH, only looks for me on Focus Saturdays when someone needs to talk or when something has gone wrong. As I walked outside I immediately spotted her talking with a woman who was sobbing, nearly uncontrollably. My first inclination was to process through the catalog of my brain, trying to figure out what might have happened and determine how I could help right whatever wrong had been done this poor, emotional creation of God.

As I got closer and Lisa saw me, however, I realized that this was a very different conversation. The woman's tears were tears of joy. She was overwhelmed by the love that she had received, by the simple opportunity to "shop" for her family and for her house. She spent the next five minutes thanking me for the blessing that GHH had been to her and her family. I will never forget the moment that she turned and pointed to her shopping pile, a stack of things that she had selected sitting by the curb and waiting to be loaded into her car. There in the pile was a new coffee maker. Coffee is my drug of choice. It is like an old friend that I chat with several times a day. Coffee is a staple for me, and, to be honest, I am a coffee snob. I love good coffee, expensive coffee. I struggle between my desire to find solidarity with those who don't have a choice what they can have, people like this woman, and my love for Caribou Coffee. Yet, on Saturday this wonderful, elated woman pointed to the box of a little white plastic coffee maker and told me that she has wanted a coffee maker for two years. She had wanted a coffee maker for two years, but could not afford to go to the store to buy one, much less buy gifts or other unnecessary extravagancies for the family.

We take so much for granted, but when we put ourselves in opportunities to learn, in places outside our norm, in places where we come face to face with those less fortunate than ourselves, it calls so many of our choices, ,our decisions, our priorities into question. Yesterday I read on another blog where someone tried to trump a discussion about college football by putting the salary from his 2004 W-2 as his "final word". Unbelievable. I have little tolerance for that kind of thing, especially when I have just rediscovered the value of a coffee maker.