Making the perfect cup of coffee is like an art project and science experiment all in one. I enjoy drinking good coffee, but the process to get that perfect cup can take time and patience. If you hurry through it your cup of coffee just won't be what it could be. You always need to start with a good bean. My preference is a coffee bean that is single origin like, Ethiopian, Guatemalan, or Columbian. I prefer a coffee bean that is roasted within 2 weeks of drinking. To make that perfect cup you have to grind the bean according to what kind of brewing method you are going to use. Right now I use a drip, v60 pour over, and a chemex pour over as my brewing methods. After grinding the bean you have to heat your water up to 205 degrees F, right below boiling. You then pour the hot water over the ground coffee bean that is then filtered. With the pour over methods there is a bloom phase where you pour a certain amount of water over the coffee bean and then wait. The hot water on the bean allows it to open up and let the gases inside the bean escape so that the next phase of water poured will filter out the most flavor and purest form of the coffee.
2020 has been a hard year for most of us. I'm part of a church where I have watched the attendance go from 100,000 people to a third of that basically over night. It has been frustrating as we have been unable to have events that we would typically. We had to close down for almost 12 weeks. It's been hard to see people that once came to church either not be able to come because of safety issues or new habits. I have watched people think that the church is taking a political stance because of mask or no mask, or race, or opening or not opening. It's been the most sad and frustrating thing to watch.
For me I have had opportunity after opportunity taken away from me this year. I have not seen my family or LifeGroup as much as I would like. I have stopped going to the gym for safety reasons. I use to be busy and have lots of things I was able to do all the time. What once was normal in my life is now a thing of the past.
I began thinking about the coffee example. I'm big on mindsets and perspectives so I begin shifting my mindset about this year and thinking that maybe to become the best version of myself I needed to go through the purification process like the coffee bean does for the perfect cup of coffee. Maybe for the church to be the purest form it has to go through this refining process.
I recently noticed this difference between Mathew 17:16 and Acts 5:15. In Mathew the disciples were unable to heal a young boy that was demon possessed. In Acts people would lay the sick along the streets so that Peter's shadow would at least fall on some of them. Why could Peter and the disciples not heal in Mathew, but even Peter's shadow could heal in Acts. What's the difference. Well, we know that Peter had denied Jesus three times between these verses. We know that Peter had experienced Jesus' love, His death and resurrection and ascension in heaven. Peter had been through some very tragic and hard situations. It was on the other side of that refinement that Peter had become the most pure form of himself. Maybe we all need to be like that coffee bean and allow ourselves to be ground down, and filtered out so that we can become the best version of ourselves. Here's to the perfect cup!
