Desires

I'll tell you what I'm passionate about. I love coffee.

I love the coffee bean itself. Especially the darkest of dark, bold coffee beans. The kind that make wimpish people faint. The kind that keep untrained people up all night, or leaves them jittery at their desks after the first two sips.

I love espresso (triple-tall-with-room Americano). Or a great French press coffee, like my son makes. But it has to be strong.

I love my "with-room" filled with a shot of heavy whipping cream, or, if there's none available, half and half. It doesn't doll up the coffee as if it's a desert, but the sweetness is nonetheless like a vacation.

I love my coffee in a ceramic cup. Just because it feels right. And not a "busy" cup with all kinds of writing or drawings on it. A simple cup that says, if anything, something like "Colorado Smiles" on it.

I love the right coffee shop. Like Homer's or Hattie's or the Coffee Trader. Someplace that doesn't remind me of a franchise. And has used newspapers laying around.

I love it when I get the right barista. The ones that know my name and who pray for me when there's a death in my family and who have never met my wife but always ask how she's been doing since her brain surgery.

You see, I love coffee. It's one of the few pleasures that I cultivate. I'm pretty simple when it comes to desires, and this is one of my favorite.

St. Augustine had a lot to say about desires. He believed, he knew, that desires are not to be cast aside as if obstructions to the Christian life. Rather, he came to understand that God takes our desires, as warped and corrupted as many of them begin, and transforms them. "You drove all fruitless joys from me, You who are the true, the sovereign Joy. You drove them from me and took their place, You who are sweeter than all pleasure." (Augustine, Confessions) Such talk is riveting. . . and alarming. I have a lot invested in coffee. Some things, I say to myself, would be better left untransformed. . . don't you think, God?

And so it was that our daughter Sarah popped up with an idea recently. Sarah, our youngest, a sophomore nursing student at William Jewell College, and passionate about Africa. A dangerous woman, dangerous to the accepted norms of suburban, consumeristic, self-centered living, Sarah said, "I want to give up drinking anything but water over Lent this year, and give all that I would have spent on drinks to Blood:Water Mission. And to get as many people as I can to join me in doing this." For those of you who've never heard of Blood:Water Mission, it's a mission started by Jars of Clay to drill clean water wells in villages all over Africa. For $1, you can supply clean water to a child for a year in Africa. Of all of Africa's challenges, one of the most crippling and most easily solved is the lack of clean water. Sarah wants to make a difference, and here she was saying, "I'm going to do something about it."

So am I. And so is my wife Susan (as usual, she made up her mind before I did). And yesterday, far more importantly than anything related to the Super Bowl, three women in my wife's Sunday School class said, "Count me in." And they were going to go tell their friends and family about it.

That's why I'm telling you. Lent starts on Wednesday. And not only is the chance to do something for others, but it might, just might, be a part of the providential and sovereign hand of God transforming desire in you.