Been making a humble Thursday morning practice of popping in the coffee shop down the road before work.
Just to stand in line for a cortado and sit for a few minutes.
In between the standing and sitting, I always seem to find something to fill my cup.
This past Thursday there wasn’t much of a line, so I stepped to the front, ordered, and skooched to the left to wait.
The waiting area’s directly in front of where the barista prepares the orders.
I’m careful not to stare.
But I do try to catch a glimpse when they’re doing the pouring.
I find all artful pourers mesmerizing.
The person working Thursday is new-ish.
Been there maybe a couple months.
Don’t know her name.
Just her smile.
She began with the requisite two shots of espresso.
Then moved to the milk.
I’m always curious to see if a barista trusts in gravity and surface tension to do their jobs … and fills the cup beyond its edge.
It’s always magic to me to bear witness to how the molecules grab on to one another, and keep each other from flowing away and spilling.
I find a hope in that.
Like nature’s just waiting for us to learn from its example.
I’ve noticed that some baristas favor the control of holding the cup in one hand to bring the spout closer … while others place the cup on the counter to keep a steady target.
The delicacy of the draw gets me every time.
The mere idea of painting with a brush that only ever gets so close to its canvas.
Seems prayerful to me.
Any distance between source and vessel requires a measure of faith.
I’ve learned that the precise amount required has little to do with how great or small the distance.
Hers was one fluid motion into the countered cup.
But then, she did this thing.
Post-pour, she reached for a spoon.
I watched as she used it to gently skooch some of the foam where she wanted it to go.
My immediate thought was that maybe things initially didn’t turn out the way she wanted.
As she skimmed the surface, she cupped her empty left hand parallel to her right … as if protecting a flickering match from the wind.
Her left hand had no practical purpose, other than maybe just to let the right know it was rooting for it.
By which I mean it may have had the most important job of all.
Satisfied, she put the spoon down and ushered my cup forward to let me know it was ready.
“I’ve never seen anyone do that … with the spoon,” I confessed.
“I do it all the time,” she said. “That’s my move.”
So, she had made no mistake.
She just wasn’t done moving mountains.
I asked her her name.
“Jaye,” she said.
“We’ll call it the ‘Jaye,’” I said.
“Aww, thank you,” she smiled, also a signature move.
It was only then that I looked down … to see that she had used the spoon to crack a tiny heart open.
By which I mean she used the spoon to crack my tiny heart open.
Whenever I am asked to meet with a new employee, I always start with the most important question.
I mean THE most important question.
I preface it by letting the person know that I’m about to ask them the most important question that they will be asked that day.
Possibly, the most important question they will be asked all week.
I let them know in advance that the question is cosmic in its scope.
Then I hit ’em with it.
“What is the greatest pizza of all time?”
I then take a minute to make sure they fully understand the question’s magnitude.
“In your expert opinion, across the hundreds of assemblages of crust, sauce and toppings you have experienced in the entirety of your illustrious, pizza-eating career … what is the GOAT?”
As they deliberate, I invite them to give thought to why.
What is it about it that makes it the greatest of all time?
The ingredients?
Where or how the ingredients are sourced? Is it the style? The type of crust? The manner in which it’s prepared? Is it the individuals who make it? The ambience in which they experience it? The location where it’s located? Is it the company they experience it with? Perhaps it’s the time in their life that they first encountered it?
Over the years, I’ve asked the question at least a hundred times.
Everyone answers differently, but they all have one thing in common.
The way their face lights up when they tell me.
You should see how such love lives on their faces.
__
So, I’m waiting out a Sunday late-morning flight delay at the Kansas City airport yesterday.
Young fella sitting next to me sees me holding a small print of a cat in a cowboy costume that some friends (who know me well) gave me that morning.
Asks me about it.
I tell him.
Then he asks me where I’m going.
I answer and, out of politeness, ask him the same.
He tells me he’s going to Paris for 82 days, to intern for a ‘church-planting’ organization … scattering seeds in France.
Couple minutes later, he’s asking me if I know Jesus, and whether I’ve accepted him as the only way to salvation.
In so many words.
I mean, soooo many words.
Meanwhile, the voice in my head starts audibly exhaling in discomfort, “Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh…” while rubbing the bridge of its metaphorical nose.
I’m just a guy admiring a print of a cat in a cowboy costume here.
Meanwhile my concerned neighbor is talking all about sin and eternity … with much conviction.
Which I respect both the act and substance of.
He’s going to make a great intern.
Says that our days are not guaranteed. Anything can happen.
“This might be the last flight we ever take,” he says, gesturing to the door to the jetway.
I don’t disagree.
He mentions that Jesus is coming back.
Soon.
I suppress the urge to mention that history is littered with a lot of humans who over-estimated their gifts for guesstimating that particular arrival time.
He starts peppering me with a bunch of questions.
And keeps pressing me for a verbal … like a flight attendant prompting an exit row passenger.
Meanwhile, all I can hear is Paul whispering in my ear “… with gentleness and respect.”
I genuinely don’t want to be disrespectful.
For all I know, God might be eavesdropping on his intern.
I also don’t want to get deep … meaning the granularity of it.
But I do want to get deep … meaning the heart of it.
And I know that if I choose the latter, he’s just going to want to further litigate the former.
But I couldn’t help myself.
So I answered him … by saying that I have a wise friend who knows more chapter and verse than I ever will.
And that the wisest thing I have ever heard him utter isn’t a Bible verse.
When someone asked him a question he didn’t have an answer for, my wise friend said that he wasn’t sure.
And added, “I’m OK with God knowing more than I do.”
Which pretty much sums up my faith right now.
It’s taken me a while to get to this cruising altitude.
I can’t tell you exactly how close I am to any destination.
There are lots of clouds when I look up.
I’m not even sure how accurate my heading is … as I tend to overestimate the scale of things.
I’m just trying to hold things steady enough to eventually give me a better vantage point.
Which is no small accomplishment, given my fear of heights and poor sense of direction.
But I do have some people in my life right now who are generous in sharing their coordinates with me. More experienced navigators who have logged a lot more miles, spent more time with the map, and seen a lot more of the world than I have. Best of all, they are generous in sharing the detours and emergency landings they’ve made … in hopes that I either avoid, or at the very least, take different ones.
God bless bound-for-Paris Josoo (“rhymes with ‘tofu’” as he introduced himself), but I don’t think I gave him the exit row answer he and his pilot were hoping for.
But his soon-to-be-summer employer should know that it wasn’t for a lack of intention on his part.
After a few minutes, I needed to detangle, so I got up to stand where the boarding lines were about to form.
I confess to you that I hoped that neither God nor United Airlines sat us next to each other on the plane.
But sitting and sifting here, though … I kinda’ regret praying for that.
Because I just thought of something I wished I would’ve asked Josoo.
I would have asked him to talk to me about love.
About love that rejoices in truth.
A love that always protects.
Always trusts.
A love that in spite of everything … still hopes and perseveres.
I’d ask him to talk to me about love so Great.
Love that never fails … even when all other prophecies cease, all tongues still, and all other knowledge passes away.
A love whose planes never run late.
___
By which I mean … I would have liked to ask him The Most Important Question.
At least the most important one anyone would ask him that day, if not over the next 82.
I would’ve asked him about the greatest pizza of all time.
I’d take a good minute to make sure he fully understood the question.
So I could learn what, in his expert, pizza-eating opinion makes it the greatest … out of all the hundreds of combinations that he’s experienced in his illustrious, pizza-eating career.
Just so I could see how love lives on his face, and feel how it lives in his heart.
Trust me … I would rejoice in learning of his personal relationship with pizza.
Which would expand my humble understanding of how crust, sauce and toppings can go together.
And all I know for certain is that he would answer the same question differently than anyone else I’ve ever asked.
And that, by the end, I would likely be hungry to experience pizza the way he experiences pizza.
And if the Spirit was really moving within me, I might even ask him his perspective when it comes to anchovies.
Not to convince him, mind you.
Just to see if we had any common ground there.
All of which to say … I’m no theologian.
I’m content knowing that if there is a God … she probably looks at me the same way I look at prints of cats in cowboy costumes.
But it’s hard for me to imagine that she cares all that much that I don’t like crust.
My wife Karry doesn’t mind.
I let her have mine.
Heck, maybe it makes God happier to see us sharing.
And I would never deign to speak for her, but I imagine that if God made us in her image, then she probably autonomically smiles when she sees how our faces light up when talking about the greatest pizza of all-time.
Heck, she’s probably just waiting for us to ask her The Important Question.
So she can reply, in so many words, “Have you ever tried it with the Jesus sauce?”
So that we can see how a love that hopes all things … lives on her face.
After driving the six hours home from Philly last Sunday, I went over to the high school track … just to give my legs a stretch.
My son got there a few minutes before me, fresh from running some errands.
When we are at the track together, we run separately.
He’s much faster. Keeps track of his times and such.
Me … I just go for the medicine of it.
The track was empty when we arrived, but after a bit I spied a couple walking down the hill. From a distance I recognized a retired teacher from the middle school. I see her walking at the cemetery sometimes too, always with a spring in her step, a smile and a kind word.
All of which she possessed when she taught. Both of our kids had her for reading.
Whenever I see Mrs. Labella my memory goes back to our son’s first year of middle school … when Karry and I signed up for parent teacher conferences.
That was … what? A dozen years ago now? Thirteen?
I say this lovingly, but Peter was a bit of a handful back then … at least from our side of the equation.
Whatever internal motor was responsible for his initiative … revved very low.
Most of his homework got done with Karry’s foot in close proximity to his keister.
His default with most things was to expend the least amount of effort required. He had dual gifts for pushing buttons and refusing to admit any wrongdoings. We often said he would make a great lawyer someday.
He also exercised great agency over his energy and attention, which was often at odds with where the world wished he would direct them.
He was never in any great hurry.
His internal clock just kept time differently.
When we met his middle school teachers for the first time, we expected to come back with homework on what we could do better at home to help him succeed in class.
I’m not sure, but I think Mrs. Labella was first.
Peter wasn’t much of a reader then … or now.
Didn’t inherit my English major genes, though he does have a genuine love for language. He just has always preferred working with his hands. Loves making and fixing things.
Reading and writing? Not so much.
I remember Karry and I bracing for impact when we first walked into Mrs. Labella’s meticulously curated classroom.
We were indeed stunned by what we heard.
She said how wonderful it was having Peter in class.
How well-behaved he was.
How much she appreciated his participation.
We were like, “Um, our son?”
He didn’t even like to read.
We were kind of speechless.
I don’t remember Mrs. Labella’s specific words, just that she saw a light in him … that we were too close to see for ourselves … and reflected it back to us.
I now know that those were the days when we — or at least I — spent way too much time squeezing the parenting handlebars way too tightly.
As Mrs. Labella chatted with us, I remember appreciating being in the presence of a person who’d spent years in the company of 12- and 13-year-olds, who deeply understood the assignment, and who loved the important and sometimes hard thing she got to do … with exactly who she got to do it with.
Someone who commanded respect, took no b.s. … and was comfortable enough in her own skin to give Grace where and when needed.
In other words, someone who was born to be a teacher.
By contrast, I realized that Karry and I were as new to being parents of a middle schooler as Peter was being a middle schooler.
Maybe we were all doing a little better than we gave ourselves credit for, even if we were collectively a little fidgety in our respective chairs.
The rest of his teachers pretty much said the same thing.
Walking out of the school that night, Karry and I joked that maybe we had a budding actor on our hands. Had ‘em all fooled, he did.
We both knew that wasn’t at all true.
The truer thing was that maybe we were in too much of a hurry with our expectations.
That maybe our parenting motors were in need of revving a little slower.
___
So … fast forward … to last Sunday at the track.
I waved to Mrs. Labella and her husband when I caught up to them.
As I jogged by, she said she appreciated a piece I’d recently written.
For the record, I’m not sure higher praise exists for a writer than to get a gold star from a middle school reading teacher.
I told her it’s a blessing to have such good things to write about.
I ran on ahead a bit … then felt moved to double-back.
“In the spirit of not assuming,” I said. “That’s my son over there,” pointing Peter out on the other side of the track. “If he didn’t say hello, make sure you say hi when he passes by.”
“I’ll trip him if he doesn’t,” she said … still not an ounce of b.s. in her voice.
I was about three-quarters of the way through my next lap when, up ahead of me, I saw this.
My 25-year-old son and his middle school reading teacher.
It filled my heart full to see that he broke from his pace to walk with them.
Turns out, his internal clock has always understood time just fine.
They took a good full lap together.
I don’t know what they talked about.
Only that they each had a smile and a kind word for the other.
I imagine he told her what he’s doing now.
I imagine that she told him she’s not surprised one bit.
I found myself slowing my pace behind them … careful not to get in the way.
Just grateful for the medicine of it … in no great hurry myself anymore.
Letters for Maggie 