Agape part I

Since I have a week left, I want to use a Starbucks reference to start this blog off.

My favorite coffee/food pairing is the Verona coffee with the chocolate hazelnut biscotti. Let me tell you, if you’ve never tried them together, it is an experience. The biscotti is super sweet on its own. The coffee, on the other hand, is rather acidic on its own, but has a definite cocoa and nutty flavor to it. Which is why they go together. The cocoa and the nuttiness fit nicely together and the sweetness and acidity balance each other out.

Now, personally, I have a sweet tooth, so I love the biscotti, and the coffee is pretty good if you brew it right. But on a personal preference level, I like the sweetness over the coffee. So when these two things mix, they take something from the other and give something of themselves. According to me, the coffee gets the better end of the deal, losing some of its acidity and gaining sweetness

Where the heck am i going with this?

We get the better end of the deal with God. He gives us grace and forgiveness and mercy and love and strength and kindness while we give Him our brokenness, sin, filth, shortcomings, heartbreaks, confusion, and lies. In this relationship we are coffee.

But, as someone who desires to be more like Christ everyday, in my relationships with other people, I need to be biscotti. If Christ gives US all those things, how much more should i afford the people in my life things like grace and forgiveness and mercy?

Even when people bad mouth me, curse me, pass rumors, break my heart, hate me, kick me out, wish bad things upon me…I am called to give them forgiveness and love and faithfulness and time and trust…and the more I do, the less all those other things will bother me because I’ll be more focused on following the Only One who won’t do all of those things

(And if you were in my Bible as Lit class…the capital O’s in the last sentence are thanks to your friendly English Translator)