Life Hack:
When you make your morning coffee, add your creamer (and sugar, if that’s your thing) to the bottom of the cup. Then pour your coffee. The pouring action will blend the cream with coffee so that you don’t have to stir it.
You now may consider yourself “green” as you’ve saved yourself one spoon from needing washed each morning. Two spoons if you’re a kind, germaphobic soul who makes his/her partner a cup but uses a different spoon for each.
*This is why McDonalds wants to add the cream for you. But it’s not because they’re green. It saves them the money on stir sticks.
It took me a few years of coffee drinking to learn this. But this change prevents the final slugs from containing most of the creamer. It is essential for mastering the perfect creamer:coffee balance. (And we all know how I’m such a winner when it come to balance).
In college, when I was learning about Jesus for the first time, again, a Bible study lesson floated around about “stirring the Holy Spirit.” It used Hershey’s chocolate syrup in milk as an object lesson. It made no sense to me. Even later, as an adult, I just didn’t get how I was supposed to stir things up. And I thought God was supposed to do that? I thought the Holy Spirit was the active force in the picture? See. I’m still confused.
If we’re going to pour tasty additives to our drinks, let’s use Pumpkin Spice Creamer* in our coffee. (Which, sadly, I left in my mother’s refrigerator this weekend so I’m now without. Fortunately my parents don’t drink creamer in their coffee and because it’s not made with real cream but is instead this delicious form of water and high fructose corn syrup, it should last until my next trip. That is, IF my sister didn’t swipe it.)
We pour God in our cup first. There’s all kinds of room and with some practice you know the exact amount that makes the cup perfect. Then you add the coffee of Life. Because the God Creamer is already in the cup, it mixes in with every drop of Life. You don’t spend time mustering up that God Creamer into parts that it didn’t seem to reach – it’s already there. Add coffee to the cream, not cream to the coffee.
Add life to God, not God to life.
Since this is the kind of life we have chosen, the life of the Spirit, let us make sure that we do not just hold it as an idea in our heads or a sentiment in our hearts, but work out its implications in every detail of our lives. (Galatians 5:25)
“If you work these words into your life you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit – but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock. But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards.” -Jesus (Matthew 7:25-27)
*Unless, of course, we’re on vacation or at the lake, when clearly Baileys would be the creamer of choice.