I’ve thought long and hard about this and I’ve decided, if you show up in my kitchen tomorrow morning and ask me to how I am feeling about God lately, I am going to teach you how to use the Keurig coffee maker.

Step by step, we will stand in my kitchen and make coffee together.

It seems only natural. Only right to explore beside you the fine, fine contraption that hisses and rolls me into Monday morning commutes and Tuesday conference calls.

Maybe you already know the simplicity in all of it. You understand the ease of inserting the K-Cup, clamping, pressing the power button and then waiting 30 seconds for the morning’s elixir to purge into the yellow ceramic cup below as we scan “D1” of the paper for the forecast and decide on rain boots.

I’ll pull a chair out from the kitchen table and let you slurp in that first taste of light roast blend before telling you the little that I know about the God I illustrate with kitchen appliances.

Real cute, you might think. What’s this girl going to do next, explain the art of falling in love with a frying pan?

I’ll tell you, now gripping a fine caffeine buzz, how very obsessed I’ve grown with complicating this God guy. He tells me to trust and follow the steps he’s laid out for me… I whine. Complicate. Demand. Stray. Do Anything But…

I’ll tell you how I am enamored with jamming the Creator of the Universe into my own compartments.

“Oh, no big deal, it’s just the dude who knows every hair on my head chillaxing in the back pocket of my Seven jeans until I need him again.”

How, even though I know it is impossible, I still insist on trying to figure out every square inch of my existence without Him, as if it were a game of Clue and I am hinging on knowing that Colonel Mustard went on a candlestick-swinging spree in the study.

Totally say it… totally pin me down and tell me the truth: God is Not a Back Pocket Jeans Kind of Guy. And then ask me: Why are you trying so hard to make Him work for you?”

Make Him Work for You. Make Him Work for You.

Your statement convicts me as I choke back my pumpkin spice because I know, I know, I am guilty of it. Of some days liking God better when I think I can fit Him into my time blocks and schedule. Of wishing He’d be the kind to give me slight pats on the wrists and never ask me to change a bit for Him.

I could flail my arms and prance around the bonfire while worshipping a God who never asked me to look inward and rearrange, scratch that: refurnish, the wicker furniture of my soul. The good that we both could stand to see better. The bad and downright ugly that we could polish new with some time & energy.

These days I am learning, I am the one made for God’s back pocket, deserving of His back pocket, and yet he always keeps me out from the denim and placed squarely in the palm of His hand. Me (aka, a faulty creature prone to wandering astray), I am His little K-Cup, a single-serving flavor designed to be processed, changed and transformed into a brew fitting for His purpose. His plans. His masterpiece.

I don’t know about you but I want to be a K-Cup so badly.

I can admit that freely and openly to any person who sits in my kitchen and sips coffee with me. I want to be wringed out and used so badly. I want to know and understand better that I don’t grow closer to Him in cluttering the directions, or making my own instruction manual. I only grow closer, draw nearer into His right side, when I let Him use me. Squeeze Me. Process Me. Do a work within me.

Not by my own strength, or my own know-how, but by the grace and fact that He knows me well enough, as a flavor that he adored enough to create. He knows exactly when to press the power button and let me brew….