God Showed Up At Starbucks On Friday

I had a whole post forming in my head about how God had abandoned me. It was what I was going to write about this weekend.

I was bitter. I had this belief that God left me the day my sister died and our village came down.

I felt I hadn’t heard from God since that cliff of a day.

Then this past Friday a giant of a man, a tree man, came to talk to me while I was sitting at a meeting at Starbucks.

It struck me as odd because it’s not every day you see a man as big and strong and outdoorsy as this guy at Starbucks.

Starbucks has a stereotypical clientele and this guy wasn’t it. It reminded me of this guy:

That’s a screenshot of a video of a stag in a church cathedral.

This man was just beautifully out of place in my mind.

He spent time telling me about his journey of God.

He brings firewood to houseless people. That’s a major need in the winter.

This amused me because I could tell this was God coming at me telling me that we were still in this together.

But there is no doubt that God and I haven’t had a really close relationship the last couple months. I wrote about this feeling in early January. God, why have you forsaken me?

This feeling hasn’t gone away. In fact, there is such a vacuum of resonance with God recently that I truly believed God had lost interest in me.

“You lost your village. I’ve got bigger fish to fry. Call me when you do something interesting again,” was my feeling of God.

And as I think about it right now, why did God need to make a big production of bringing a message to me with this tree man at Starbucks?

That’s not really helping me know how to move forward. It just felt like a postcard from God. “Thinking of you from Florida, Love God.”

That’s nice and all. But I was hoping for a little more direction or something.

Maybe it’s like that song from Johnny Cash: A boy named Sue.

And he said, “Son, this world is rough
And if a man’s gonna make it, he’s gotta be tough
And I know I wouldn’t be there to help ya along
So I give ya that name and I said goodbye
I knew you’d have to get tough or die
And it’s the name that helped to make you strong”

Maybe God is toughening me up. Maybe God is teaching me how to move on my own. Maybe God isn’t great at dealing with the myopic, fear of man and doesn’t really know what to tell me to do.

I’ve lived most of my life without a father-figure. I don’t feel resentment over it. It’s just the way it is. Like I imagine losing an arm or leg might be. What are you going to do? Be bitter and resentful the rest of your life? Just move on and you do you.

I guess that’s it. You do you.

I am telling you for a fact: God and I were walking step by step together as we built our village. And when the village was taken from us God receded out of the picture.

You can analyze the psychologically of that all you want. But the resonance was gone. I was left standing alone in the dirt. Just like before our village.

I can’t wrap this up in a tidy little bow for you.

God said hi on Friday. I’m still out here alone.

There is, however, one feeling I have: There is a magic to human beings. Our consciousness allows us to make observations of the world. And boy do I have some observations: Namely, our government gives no fucks about the poor. It fills me with rage.