Portrait from a coffee shop

Sometime in October, I snagged a round table in front of the 13^th Street Starbucks and unpacked my laptop, notepad and cellphone. I had a news story to write. 

As I pounded out some words about a new wave of ticket sales at the performing arts center, I gradually became aware of two people occupying the table next to me. They were talking.

I looked up. One was a balding white man in his 50s. He sat across from a black, middle-school-aged boy whose floppy red backpack slouched against the wire chair. The boy was drinking something fun – like a cookie-and-crème iced latte – and his older friend sipped on steaming black coffee.

They were nothing alike, and I started wondering how they came to be spending time together.

Then I saw that a Bible sat between them. The elder held the book open against the wind with fingertips pressed onto the tissue-thin pages. He would, slowly, read sentences from a Bible story, about a prophet surrounded by an enemy army on a mountain. And then he would look up. He would ask, “Do you understand what the horses and chariots of fire meant?” And the younger nodded. Unlike most kids his age, he made direct eye contact. He was fully engaged.

“It means God was with him.”

The mentor smiled.

“That’s right. So you know what that means, right? God is with you.”

Uninvited tears started to slide down my face onto my open notebook. I bowed my head over my work so maybe no one would notice, and I blotted my eyes with a crumpled Starbucks napkin.

I kept listening. In some creative stretch, the older man tied this Old Testament story perfectly into the Cross, and he began gushing about the love the Lord has for this little boy, and how he is forgiven, and he has a new identity in Christ. It was powerful.

Something was shifting in my mind. Something amazing was happening right next to me that I was not involved with at all. Without my assistance or input, and without my prayers, someone was taking the initiative to disciple someone else.

I realized that I’d been unknowingly operating under the assumption that I have to be involved in everything God is doing – or rather, if God is going to do anything around me, I have to be involved. But that day in the coffee shop, I got a little glimpse of how big he is. He let me in on a little part of something he is doing all over my city. God’s kingdom was coming in Gainesville in ways that I knew nothing about – these two people were all the proof I needed.