WHAT IS WRONG WITH US?

“Maybe we both have COVID,” I surmised to my wife. Neither of us is subject to headaches. Both of us were experiencing awful ones. For days. My head felt simultaneously as if it were in a vice and full of slushy mush. Fatigued, for three days we complained and moped and dragged ourselves around. We wondered silently each one to ourselves and out loud to each another, “What is wrong with us?” What was wrong? It hit me when I went to fix coffee for the fourth day: Earlier in the week we had run out of our usual coffee. Deciding to wait until Saturday to purchase more from the store where we found it greatly discounted, I decided to use some specialty coffee we had purchased with graciously given gift cards. “Dark roasted” was all I saw on the package. That is what we preferred. For the next three days, I filled the filtered basket on our coffee maker with this high-end coffee. It had a nice aroma. Prepared the night before, the coffee maker goes off each morning at 5:30 am, so, by drinking coffee, we have occasion to spend time together the first part of each day.” Each morning during those three days, we both commented that this new coffee had a good flavor but seemed a little weak. “But,” I protested, “I have filled the filter as fully as possible. I can’t add more coffee.” That last evening, when I filled the basket for the next day, I took another look at the package. There in a small circle on the right of the package I read, “Decaf.” Walking to where she was sitting, I hollered to my wife, “I think I’ve figured it out! “We’ve been drinking decaf coffee! I didn’t see that label until just now.” “That has to be it,” my wife eagerly agreed. “That’s why we’ve had the headaches. I know we don’t normally drink caffeinated coffee this late, but we just might have to tonight to get our caffeine and fix these headaches.” Don’t judge us. Before you cite our headaches and low-performance functionality as evidence of our caffeine addictions and troll this post with condemnatory comments, think: Each caffeine naysayer and decrier would have the same symptoms if you didn’t eat for a day. Does that mean you have a sinful addiction to food? Well, I stumbled into that. I better leave that topic alone. But, if you protest, “Food is a necessity of life,” I must ask, “And coffee isn’t?” Satire aside, I really want to and wrote to share what I immediately thought upon my discovery of what was wrong with us: Just as not having our daily dose of caffeine had real impeding and painful effects on our daily living, so it is with one’s Christian life, with worship and prayer and with ministry when we attempt to “do it” without the empowerment and impetus of the Spirit. This is not a disconcerting, off-putting, but a wonderful truth. The NT scriptures, again and again, turn to the reality that we can—and can only—live the Christian life by the motivation, inspiration, activation, stimulation, and instigation of the Spirit of God. His effects are far more visceral to our souls and minds than caffeine is to our bodies and heads. That is the wonderful thing. We can have the Spirit daily “in our system” having this life-altering effect. The stimulate of our souls and inner lives should not be coffee. Nor wine for sure. It should be the Spirit of God (Eph. 5:18). Are you moping and groping? Are you lagging and dragging? Are you apathetic and lethargic? Is life, is serving God, a drudgery? Dull? Ineffective? What is wrong with you? Take another look at what you are “drinking,” partaking of daily. Does it have the label “de-Spirit”? The moment I realized I had once again poured decaf coffee into the coffee maker’s basket, I immediately emptied it into a Zip-lock and refilled the filter with real stuff, the good stuff, the stuff with the caffeine. Likewise, when our lives are devoid of an intake of the things of the Spirit, when we are not being filled with the Spirit, we should empty our lives of whatever we must to make room for the things of the Spirit, for the Spirit Himself. What is wrong with us? Nothing that cannot be fixed by drinking coffee…of the Spirit. --Pastor Clifford Hurst