Weird

I think my tastebuds are broken.

It's a Thursday morning, and I'm tired. It's a cold Thursday morning, so I decide I want something warm to drink. I have a fifteen minute break before I need to leave for my next class, so I head over to the coffee shop and pick up something that sounds pretty good: a vanilla and peppermint white mocha. Vanilla, peppermint, and white chocolate. What's not to love?

Well, it tastes like coffee. As in just coffee. If I hadn't seen them putting the other flavors in, I'm not sure I would believe they were there. I happen to run into one of my friends, who asks me what I'm drinking. I tell her and let her have a sip because she loves these. Her response is something like, "What coffee?"

Apparently, I have just purchased the coffee drink with the least possible coffee taste in the entire coffee shop, and all I can taste is the stupid coffee. My friend drinks coffee slightly more often than I do. I hardly ever drink coffee. All that to say, she doesn't drink much coffee either. And yet she can taste all the other flavors and hardly the coffee.

I have weird tastebuds.

Then my other friend and I walk across the Beltline to our class only to discover an empty room when we get there. She checks her email on her phone. Class is cancelled. (It's like a snow day! Only not. At all.) That was also weird.

So now I'll get to have lunch before English instead of after (weird), I can get started studying for my Greek quiz before this afternoon (weird), and yesterday I read a thing for my cancelled communications class about some people who literally worship Michael Jackson (extra weird).

Also, coffee is weird. I can't figure out if I like it or not. I think I would like it more if I could actually taste the other flavors, which is what I was drinking it for in the first place. As is, it's just kind of "eh." It smells good, anyway.

Long story short: things are weird. Like Thursdays. And coffee.

Sabbath Day

I really like Lent. Which I guess is a little weird, because it isn't a particularly happy season, but I really do like it. I like its reflectiveness, its challenge to us to think about things we normally push away in favor of sunshine and rainbows. I like its preparation for and expectation of Holy Week and the resurrection.

Traditionally, Lent involves giving something up. Certain foods and technologies are popular things to do away with for the forty days of Lent. One of my friends and I were talking about what we were going to give up before chapel on Ash Wednesday. We each wanted to do something meaningful, and as our pastor challenged us during chapel, something that will help us grow closer to God. My friend mentioned a thought she'd had, I asked her if she wanted someone to take the challenge with her, and she said, "Let's do it."

And so I came to be giving up doing homework on Sundays for Lent. I think this will be an interesting challenge – hard in some ways, as I'll have to be disciplined enough to work on more of it than I usually do on Fridays and Saturdays – and one that's good for me. In all honesty, I'm not very good at remembering the Sabbath day and keeping it holy. I don't always set it apart from the other days of the week. I go to church, sure, but other than that... too often it's just another day.

Lent is a time of repentance and renewal, preparing us for the Easter resurrection. It lasts forty days – if you actually grab a calendar and count, though, the total number will be more than forty. This is because, as my devotional book tells me, the Sundays during Lent aren't counted in the forty days. Why not? Not because Sundays don't count as a day, but because Sundays during Lent are resurrection celebrations that occur throughout the season. They're Sabbaths. Time for rest and renewal. During this season of Lent, my friend and I have challenged each other and ourselves to set them apart. To remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy, and to hold one another accountable to that. It might not be easy, but easy isn't the point. The point of Lent isn't giving something up, however easy or difficult it may be. The point is rising again on Easter Sunday.

"Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy."

– Exodus 20:8-11

Challenge accepted.

Treasures of Darkness

One of the girls on my floor invited me to come with her to another dorm last night for one installment of a weekly series called "Equipping Your Prayer Life." The RD who leads the sessions opened with this verse, which he'd read that morning in his daily devotions:

I will go before you
     and level the mountains,
I will break in pieces the doors of bronze
     and cut through the bars of iron,
I will give you the treasures of darkness
     and riches hidden in secret places,
so that you may know that it is I, the LORD,
     the God of Israel, who call you by your name.

                            Isaiah 45:2-3 (NRSV)

Before I left for college I worked at a resale store. Probably my favorite thing in that resale store was a cardboard box that one of the workers used to keep on the shelves behind her counter in the back. Scrawled on the side of box in black Sharpie were the words "treasures of darkness."

I have no idea who wrote that on the box or why that person wrote it on that particular box, but there it was. I stopped by the treasures of darkness box almost every time I worked, since I needed to get something out of it. Which begs the question: what was in the box?

Answer: rags.

I will give you the treasures of darkness
     and riches hidden in secret places.

Thanks, but no thanks. I used to go to the treasures of darkness box to grab a rag before I went to clean the bathrooms after we closed the store for the night. I think I can do without any more treasures of darkness.

Riches tucked away in secret places sound good to us – or even "hidden treasures," as another translation renders the words "treasures of darkness." We don't expect to open the lid of the treasure chest and find a pile of worn, stained, bathroom-cleaning rags. If that's what treasures of darkness are, most of us would probably pass.

And I know that Isaiah probably didn't have rags in mind when he spoke of treasures of darkness all those years ago, but I find the connection intriguing all the same. Maybe I shouldn't pass up on those old rags so quickly. Maybe they really are a treasure in a way, a treasure hidden in the darkness because we definitely don't expect them to be a treasure. Maybe the purpose they serve – the purpose they can only serve when hands like mine take hold of them – can be a treasure in itself.

I don't know what happened to the treasures of darkness box. It vanished after the back room was cleaned out one day and the rags were relocated to some bins below another counter. I missed that box. It always made me smile when I saw it, just because I thought it was kind of funny that the rags were kept in a box that said "treasures of darkness."

Maybe there was a little more to that than I used to think.

Sunday Afternoon Adventures

Standing in a tiny gas station for forty-five minutes is actually more interesting than you might think. It's not something people often have the opportunity to do without being given some extremely odd looks, unless you happen to be an employee. Which I'm not, but when you're helplessly waiting for your brother to change a flat tire, it's a pretty good reason to stand in a tiny gas station for an extended period of time.

I can't say I particularly wanted to be standing in that gas station, and Sunday afternoon isn't an extremely busy time of the week. All the same, it's interesting to see the people who come in and why they do. In the minute or so I saw them, I got a tiny glimpse into their lives. I'd wonder where they'd been this morning or yesterday afternoon, what brought them out into this wind-blown snowy weather, what they might be thinking about these two girls standing in a gas station. Some of them seemed familiar with the lone employee working and made friendly small talk as she rang up their usual purchases.

I felt a little out of place in that gas station, standing there watching the progress on the car as the people came in and out. Somehow, though, all these people and I are the same. We're all human beings, made in the image of God. Our paths crossed for maybe a minute, and odds are they won't cross again. If they do, we probably won't even know it.

Yet I have to wonder: what made me feel out of place? Why is it so hard for us to realize at times that no matter where our paths start or lead, we are all people made in God's image, woven together by our common humanity?