This week I came face to face with a genuine dilemma. I had several meetings across town and for some reason miscalculated and ended up with a two and a half hour gap between meetings. I hate wasting time but if I were to go back to my office I would just have to come back to my meeting later and with the cost of gas these days one cannot be too cautious.
You know gas is on the rise when it costs more to fill the car than it is actually worth. The most valuable thing in my car is in the gas tank.
I remedied the situation by stopping at a small coffee shop for a cup of Joe. As for me, there is no bad time to have a coffee, despite the price. I ordered my coffee and when the waitress brought it to me, I started thinking about coffee. Why did God give us coffee?
Then I thought back to my grandfather, whose greatest gift to me was a love of coffee. Nobody liked coffee more. I remember one of his favorite quotes: “You can always tell a man by the coffee he drinks.”
To my grandfather, the idea of instant coffee was anathema. No man, in her opinion, would ever drink such a thing. “If a man drank instant coffee,” my grandfather encouraged himself, “there is no way of knowing what else he would do. Never trust a man who drinks instant coffee.”
Making coffee was an art form for my grandfather. There was a right way and a wrong way to make coffee, and he always insisted on the right way. Of course, the correct way was his.
In Grandpa’s kitchen there was an old wood stove. My grandmother cooked meals on this antique appliance for over 50 years. On this old-fashioned stove, my grandfather made his famous clay broth. He never allowed my grandmother to make the infusion; it was his job, which he took seriously.
Once for his birthday, we all collaborated and bought him an electric coffee maker. I had never seen my grandfather so angry. When he saw what it was, he didn’t even take it out of the box.
He had strong ideas about coffee and how it should be prepared and woe to the person who contradicted his ideas!
Grandpa always had a fire in the old wood stove and in the back of the stove he kept his coffee maker, a big 2 gallon pot, one of those old fashioned coffee makers that have long gone out of style. The coffee was always on, and it didn’t matter when you stopped by, he always had “fresh” coffee brewing.
When I say “cool”, I need to explain it. Actually, the coffee was freshly brewed on Sunday. On Saturday night, I routinely emptied the coffee pot and made fresh coffee for Sunday morning.
I had an old coffee grinder and I was grinding the coffee beans on Saturday night. He put some other things in the coffee, I never knew what. One thing I know he put in was a crushed eggshell. I have no idea what it did to his coffee, but Grandpa was sure it was an important ingredient.
Freshly ground coffee beans were placed in, the pot was filled with fresh water, and placed on the back of the stove to slowly perk up. This coffee would last all week. The coffee was so strong on Sunday that if it didn’t wake you up in the morning, you were dead.
In fact, Cousin Ernie died on a Sunday afternoon, so my grandfather tells the story, and one sip of his coffee just woke him up and he lived seven more years, which was a shame for Grandpa, as he had to support it. .
Before retiring each night, my grandfather took care of his coffee. I would freshly grind some coffee beans, sprinkle them over the old coffee grounds, and then add a freshly ground eggshell. Then I would refill the coffee pot with water.
Their coffee was filtered 24/7 and on Saturday it was so strong that you needed half a cup of sugar just to drink one cup. It was thick enough to use as syrup in your pancakes, but so strong that it dissolved your pancakes before you could eat them.
My grandmother once tried to wash the coffee pot. When my grandfather saw it, he was furious, “Never wash that coffee pot,” he blurted out, “you will ruin its character and a coffee maker needs a lot of character to make good coffee.”
When my grandfather died, I looked at his old black coffee pot and discovered two things. One, the original color was blue. And two, even though it was originally a 2-gallon pot, it could only take three-quarters of the water. The “character”, so important to my grandfather, had been built so much over the years that its capacity diminished.
As I meditated on my grandfather, I thought of my Heavenly Father and His gifts. The Bible puts it this way; “Every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from above from the Father of lights, in whom there is no change, nor shadow of variation” (James 1:17).
I really don’t know why God gave us coffee, but I do know that God’s character is of such a nature that it never diminishes his ability to bless me each day.
