I met the Holy Spirit Sunday morning. I had twenty minutes between services, was exhausted from traveling all weekend, and my MIC congregation only serves decaf coffee; so I decided to run across the street to the panaderia on the corner and get a cup of coffee and a danish. I walked through the door of the small store, and there she was standing behind the counter, a 5’1” Guatemalan woman in her mid 50s, the Holy Spirit.
“Coffee?” she asked before I could say anything, compassion in her warm, soft voice. Maybe she asked because it was her job to sell me coffee, but something about the tone of her voice told me there was more to it than that. Something in the tone of her voice told me she saw the edge of my clergy collar under my coat and recognized a cold, tired, and overwhelmed seminarian who so desperately wants to be a pastor, but right now just drinks a lot of coffee and dresses like one sometimes. Without waiting for a response, she turned to fill up a cup.
“Yes,” I responded, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice. “You read my mind!”
“Room for cream?” She turned back towards me, eyes warm and compassionate. “Two or three?”
“Oh, oh, oh,” I stuttered, startled. I only like a very little bit of cream if any, just enough to take the edge off, too much makes my teeth feel thick. She opened the container and before I could stop her, dumped the entire packet in my coffee.
“You take sweet!” she said firmly, pushing the cup towards me and gesturing to the sugar bowl, and then to the stirring sticks and stack of lids. “Stirrer, lid.” I’m not usually a big sugar person, but she was so insistent that I busied myself with putting sugar and a lid on my coffee while she got my danish. Two minutes and $2.35 later, I was out the door with a cup of very hot coffee and a really delicious cream cheese danish that was just the perfect amount of sweet.
That cup of coffee was life-giving this morning, and not because it was very good. It was very hot with a bitter edge, and had too much cream for my taste (the danish, on the other hand, was possibly the best I’ve ever eaten, definitely worth the drive to Andersonville if you are ever in the Chicagoland area). But there was something sacramental about that cup of coffee. Something about our very brief interaction, her knowing eyes, her softness in dealing with me, left me feeling that more had gone on than her selling me coffee. For a fleeting moment, I felt something bigger than the two of us look at me from behind her eyes and see past the collar and the confidence I’m trying to grow into, to the cold, overwhelmed, and scared wanna-be pastor who is really me. I felt someone see all the fear and confusion I hold close to my bones, but also all the desire and passion and hope entwined around it, and love that whole mess of emotion and possibility, and feed that with the best she had to offer—hot coffee, a lot of cream, and a few minutes of compassion. And my pneumatology is not that great, but that feels a whole lot like the Holy Spirit. Jesus said after him there would be another advocate, a comforter, a friend who would walk beside us, flow within us, and sustain us in this life. One who will see us for the complicated beings that we are, love us as perfect creatures made in the image of God, and nourish us as we seek to follow in the path of Christ. Thanks be to God who shows up in the most unexpected places, in bread and wine, in water, in the Word, and sometimes even in bad coffee and simple interactions in crowded bakeries on chilly Sunday mornings.
