Drink Coffee and Live

 A friend of mine sent me an article about the latest scientific research that shows how people who drink six or more cups of coffee a day have a definitive 10 percent increase in their ability to stay alive while others are not staying alive. That’s right. A clear decrease in overall mortality due to a constant consumption of the divinely provided beverage, el Cafe.

Um. But if you smoke. No deal. You throw it all away.

Of course, they didn’t say what kind of coffee these people were drinking. And it’s scary to think that people are living longer if they are drinking one of the major coffee brands, sold in large, coffin like cans, stale and tasteless. That stuff could kill a vulture. I wouldn’t want to live longer if it was only to drink that stuff.

If you could see my face right now you’d see a clear look of disdain as I contemplate drinking such offensive coffees for long periods of time. I mean, I can have a cup at someone’s house, I’m not a snob, but I try to avoid it whenever possible, not because I’m too good, but because it is too bad.

I ran out of good coffee a few weeks ago. I was too lazy to go to the store. My wife had a can of the “good” to the last drippy stuff. Seriously. It was stunning in its awfulness. I had forgotten how bad it is. Soooooo bad. It’s almost like they’re doing it on purpose.

Maybe someday I’ll post about how we’ve lost our taste for decent coffee. It is a historical fact, a tragedy really. A by-product of war and forgetfulness. But, for now, I leave you with this encouragement:

Don’t just drink coffee and live. DRINK GOOD COFFEE AND LIVE!


Peace to you.


© LW Publishing 2011

Dark Water

We slept in the car, on the road between here and that place of loss. To view empty bodies. Broken. I was empty headed and too young for my own good. Talking stupid came easy to me. But he was wise beyond his years. And kind. He took me to the door of death and stood with me while I peeked in. I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t know how to process it.

I had seen the cost of this over the years, had lived with the cost, endured it, but I was too young to feel the pull of the waves. I was farther down the stream, where you can imagine waterfalls and oceans, instead of the dark flow from hard rock on the side of a moss covered mountain that no one can stop up.

Later, I saw the water rise, flood the hospital room where my grandmother was drowning in her mortality. It didn’t scare me but it disturbed me. It shook my spirit. And I have seen this wash of mortality again and again since. I have held the hand of people, soaking in it, waiting for the waves to take them under.

It makes me wonder how well I will tread this awful, dark water myself. How will I handle it as it fills my lungs. As I’m reaching for that strong hand on the other side to pull me up to safety.

© LW Publishing 2011

Relics

Today, for no particular reason, I was remembering how, over the years, usually when traveling, I’ve come across little country churches that were built years and years ago. Some as far back as the seventeen hundreds. And what you find is that it was common for a graveyard to be attached to the church, or very close by, especially in smaller rural communities, with ancient looking headstones lined up in rows.

Some people hate seeing these headstones. I’ve talked to people who get creeped out by them. But I enjoy reading them and imagining the lives of the people whose bodies were put into the ground in that spot at some time in the long past. With the oldest graves, the people who lived those lives did it without television or even radio. Most lived without phones or electricity or plumbing. It was a very different world, and most of them died pretty young. In fact, it is a bit troubling sometimes to read how many of those tombstones were carved out for babies who didn’t last even one year. It was a hard world to live in, especially before antibiotics became readily available, which was less than 100 years ago. Prior to that, a small cut could take your life if it became infected..

But the grave stones that impact me the most on an emotional level are the ones where the writing on them has been washed away by erosion. You might see part of a date, a few letters of the name, but not much more than that. And some of them have literally crumbled into pebbles and dust.

There was this one time when I was in Tennessee, I was walking through a woodsy area and I came across some headstones that you could barely see. They were covered in ivy and weeds and grass and there were trees grown up all around them, some of them had actually been broken up by the roots of trees. It took me a moment to realize that it was a forgotten cemetery. So much time had passed that there was no one left to care for it.

Give it enough time and we all become relics. At least our physical bodies do. Stuff for future generations to dig up and display in museums. And this can be kind of depressing, I suppose. But it doesn’t depress me. It just makes me think.

It makes me consider how little time we really have here on this planet. And it makes me want to spend the time I have wisely. Not in fear, but with purpose. I have confidence that there’s more to this life than . . . this life. So, for me, my life and the lives of everyone else on this planet, they’re all part of a big picture, like patterns on a quilt being made in the hand of God. It's a part of what keeps me warm when the world goes cold.



Psalm 90:12
Peace to you.



© LW Publishing 2011