The Starbucks here in Johnson City is quite a bit different than most I have visited. The manager who interviewed me says it has the second highest volume of any Starbucks in the state. I have spent probably four hours collectively here today and I have never seen a less private coffee shop. People come here to be with other people…all day they have all been thoroughly engaged in conversation.
I am beset with the warm ache of humanity’s weight. There are so many people. Every face is a rich life…every seat here is filled with layers of waking and rising, thinking, indulging, guilt and joy, interest, honesty and façade. There are hobbies represented here, there are shames, there is the rickety scaffolding of ego, there are secret loves of simple things like beautiful undiscovered creatures in the ocean – hidden even from their owners.
I have known men and women set free. I tell you I have seen and heard them with my eyes and ears and they breath. They have shed the metal, jamming hinges from their joints and their iron corsets. They have let go their ponderous smiles. The hands of others have lifted them and born them – tasted their sweat and wiped the salt from their eyes…born them down the narrow corridors of weeping stone into the stale deep. And together they have emerged and they breath.
I witness the genuine earnest conversations here and I ache for the words of life in them. I hope for these talking patrons to be cherished…and I hope for their crutches to be eased from their hands.
People who live far beyond the boundaries of the savvy emergent movement are chewing on the threadbare seams of the church. I’ve heard it all day long. Today’s unspoken protestant creed is a burden that has been born by its last generation. It is like a deep splinter that has festered and swollen the flesh with pus. Its expulsion from the body is an inevitable, painful relief.
Through the negligence of her employer my wife was stuck with a used needle at the doctors office she works at last Friday. She went to the emergency room yesterday for blood testing. We won't know anything till late this week and she'll have to get tested again in six months. Please pray for her.
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2 comments:
great poem/post, and I will.
where is Johnson City? wow that is crazy about the needle man, definitely will as well....Its pretty incredible what Starbucks has created and can create as far as a comfort for real people and real life.
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