When life takes away your chocolate milk, drink coffee instead.

Today I got out of bed starving. I was literally awoken by the sound of my stomach wailing for food, which is not a pleasant sensation. So I trudged to the cafeteria for a bowl of coco-roos. I LOVE COCO-ROOS. (For two reasons: 1. The coco part. 2. My dad calls me Roo...as in the kangaroo from Winnie the Pooh...so when I eat them, I think of him.) So anyways, I was seriously looking forward to this bowl of cereal. When I got to the cafeteria, I headed straight for the coffee percolator (I have a routine) and filled up my coffee cup, then I poured as much cereal into my bowl as would possibly fit. Then I walked over to the chocolate milk dispenser thing (I have a problem with white milk from the cafeteria...it gives me a weird feeling), and then I looked up and I saw a sign. It said, “Temporarily Out Of Service”. I’m pretty sure the cafeteria people think I can’t read because I stood there for a while and tried to figure out the situation (Granted I had not had my coffee or my coco-roos, so I still wasn’t fully awake.). I didn’t even know what to do, so I took my chocolate-milk-less bowl and my cup of coffee to a table and sat there and stared at my forlorn, dry, little coco-roos. Then I picked up my cup of coffee and dumped it on them. They were really good that way.

My Addiction

Lately I’ve been thinking about coffee...lately as in for the past five minutes. I spent this past weekend at my parents’ house, and it got me thinking about the way that we communicate: coffee. When something is wrong, my mum puts on a pot of coffee. When we have something to celebrate, we make more coffee. When I just need to sit and chat about something, I hear the words, “Let me just go start a pot of coffee”. When my dad wants me to get out of bed, he brings me a perfectly percolated cup of coffee. Almost every holiday memory I have involves coffee. Every time I’ve come home from a funeral my mum has shoved a cup of coffee into my hands. Every time I had something big to celebrate my dad and I went out for coffee.

When I moved out of my parents’ house I was shocked that the people I lived with didn’t consume coffee in the ravenous way my parents and I did. My mum had sent me off with nice little packages of my favorite brands and flavors of coffee and pretty little mugs that reminded me of home. I thought that was how everyone’s family worked. Oh contraire mon ami...

Sometimes I think about quitting coffee. It’s an expensive habit to maintain when done right. It’s also kind of inconvenient...especially when you run out of coffee and then remember the next morning when your head is blindly screaming at you to feed your addiction or face the consequences. But at the same times, when I wake up to my coffee in the morning, I know that my dad is waking up to the same smell. When I pour my first cup of the day at seven in the morning, I know that my mum has already finished her first pot. This makes me feel good. I don’t think I’ll ever quit...hopefully GOD will let us have coffee in Heaven.

Bricks and other fun things...

I am snowed in right now. The Great Snowmagedon of 2011 hit pretty hard here. And I don’t just mean that classes are canceled, I mean that I went out for dinner yesterday and that was it. Today it’s doubtful whether I’ll even do that (Thank goodness for pop tarts and reese’s peanut butter cups!). So anyways, this snowed in business has left me with a lot of free time to think, which isn’t something that I usually have a whole lot of.

 Here are some of my thoughts:

1. The internet is a black hole that sucks away your life.

2. When scrubbed with bleach, my shower turns a different color...the color of clean.

3. I will have to buy more coffee when I can finally get to the store without an adventurous trek through snow and ice. I thought that what I had would last me for at least two months longer, but apparently being snowed in increases your caffeine consumption. Who knew?

4. I am a hypocrite.

5. It’s a good thing that I brought all those movies and books back from my parents’ house.

6. The Office is a really funny show, especially when you watch it with a bunch of people.

7. Snow is really wet when it melts all over your rug.

Okay, so a lot of you are probably wondering about number four. It was kind of thrown in there. By GOD. The rest of those thoughts are probably my original work, but number four isn’t something that I would think of myself on my own. This kind of goes back to my whole need for self-perfection. (If you’re new here, I’ve talked about my need for perfection before; you can catch up here, here, and here.) I really like to think of myself as being something amazing...but I’m not. I’m really, really flawed...and that’s a brick that GOD’s been throwing in my face these past couple of days. And it’s one big brick.

A lot of my close friends have told me that I did not leave them with a good first impression. They thought I was snobby and full of myself. We’ve always been able to laugh it off and act like it was just a thing of the past that didn’t matter anymore. But the first impressions I leave on people now are not a thing of the past. They’re happening every day with more new people than I can count. Sadly, these new people usually only get the chance to see that first impression. They see me in passing, but I don’t reach out to them. I didn’t realize this until one such person set me down yesterday and told me how she was feeling about my treatment of her. Ouch. (Thankfully that conversation ended with us watching hilarious YouTube videos together.)

It never occurred to me that I was hurting anyone. I blamed my inability to reach out to strangers on shyness and my personality. I said that if someone wanted to be friends with me, then they could put forward the effort toward getting to know me themselves; I was not going to put myself out there by any means. But that attitude was so flawed. It was not my personality that was stopping me from showing kindness, it was my pride. It was not shyness hindering me; it was my insecurities and my fear of vulnerability.

Ironically enough, my bad attitudes about people led me to a lot of hypocrisy. I would talk about loving others, but I never really seemed to put that into practice. Instead of meeting people and sharing Christ with them as I was called to do, I would hide from them and keep Jesus to myself. I talked a lot, but my walk wasn’t really happening (Refer to Christian cliché # 409: You can talk the talk and walk the walk, but your walk talks louder than your talk talks.).

Anyways, I want to change all this. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trapped in hypocrisy and selfishness.  Thank GOD for grace and forgiveness as I start this journey towards kindness and reachingoutedness. To borrow an Anne of Green Gables quote, “Tomorrow is always fresh, with no mistakes in it yet”. Thank goodness for that.