Saturday morning my discipline of coffee-making experienced some technical difficulties. The appliance was in working order. I had adequate coffee supply and filters to spare. What tripped me up was a mis-shapen filter basket. The plastic basket had undergone a baptismal experience the night before in our dishwasher. Saturday morning - it was in no shape to make coffee. (pun intended) It hadn't been submitted to full immersion, just sprinkling with some serious heat to endure. The warped coffee filter basket was non-cooperative. Well, I did what any red-blooded United Methodist clergy would do in a similar situation - I became really frustrated! After ten minutes of filter basket disobedience, I received a revelation. Soon the coffee was perking - with the help of a large rubber band, which I had stretched from the front of the basket to the back of the coffee maker. It was a calculated risk, I'll admit. But caffeine is a regular part of this pastor's breakfast. The rubber band held the basket in place. Sunday morning I noticed that it was working again - without a rubber-band crutch. The once mis-shapen vessel has been healed and the brown brew is flowing freely again, as it should. All is well with the world. Well, at least the coffee cosmos anyway.....
As odd as this may seem, the whole experience causes me to reflect back to an experience some months ago. In May of 2007 our church welcomed a long tall stranger into our midst. His teaching was some of the most life-giving I have ever been priviledged to experience. This gifted communicator and teacher was none other than Robert Mulholland, Jr. By the end of the weekend he seemed more of a friend than a stranger. In, Shaped By The Word, "Bob" Mulholland writes:
"When God puts a “finger” on those things in our lives that are inconsistent with God’s will for our wholeness, it is not simply to point them out. It is not just to say that they must go or must be changed. That finger has a hand attached that offers us the nurture into wholeness that we need at that point. This concern for our whole being is the essential nature of God’s knock upon the closed doors of our lives. The knocks come at those points where God is shut out of our lives, and we are imprisoned within; imprisoned by some bondage that does not allow us to be free in God’s love and in God’s will for our wholeness in our life with others. Precisely at these points in my life is where I regularly encounter something that disturbs me, upsets me, troubles me, throws me off balance in either my perceptions or my feelings. With consistent regularity, these experiences become God’s knocking upon the closed doors of my life. These are the points where God chooses to begin a new work of growth toward wholeness in my being."
The malfunctioning filter basket is a metaphor for my own life; created for a purpose, yet distorted from my original God-image. I am unable to re-shape myself - yet hands are constantly at work , nurturing me back toward my original shape. To borrow from one comtemporary songwriter, "This is the air I breathe....Your Holy presence...living in me."
I once attempted to capture this miracle in a verse.
The Master comes to bring us life - abundantly,
To breathe into our very souls His Kingdom's seed.
Transforming us with unseen hands - the Potter shapes the clay;
Then pours into our hearts - God's never-ending day.......
Still In ONE Peace,
Jon(the methodist)
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