Two of the three cafés in my town are owned by God
am I wrong for loving this?
It’s been a while since I’ve written to you from the heart.
In November, I confessed, I’m not a liar— I’m a poet. (Still true). In December, Corey and I moved into a new place, and then the holidays, and well….things have been a little busy around here. But I’m back, and this week, we’re expanding on my initial post: It’s not that I don’t believe in God.
I wrote this essay in a café owned by God. Can you tell which one?
Two of the three cafés in my town are owned by God
by Maria Giesbrecht
fearing families. The first one has Bible posters beside the salt shakers. In the second, gospel music hums—only instrumental, I imagine, so as not to scare away the heathens. Both serve the best homemade potato bacon soup I’ve ever had.
Last December, Corey and I moved outside the city and into a smaller neighbourhood with exactly seven golden retrievers and twelve families with 1.26 kids. In our last home, we lived near a different café I went to almost every morning to write. (Leaving a café and finding a new one is a special kind of hurt.) The last time I did it, I became friends with an older gentleman named Bob, who had the same café schedule I did—early or not at all.
After a few weeks of enjoyable morning company, I found out he was a pastor.
So when we first moved into the new house and our neighbour greeted us with God’s blessing, I thought, oh no, here we go again.
I can’t seem to shake God. These days, everything holy clings to me like burrs on a wool coat.
And surprisingly, as an ex-evangelical, I don’t hate it. In fact, I’ve admitted it before, and I’ll admit it again: I love God in small doses. A cathedral in Italy, a Christmas mass, a wedding service for two people who love each other like white swans in the summer heat, and now, a café with Jesus whispering to me in the morning.
I don’t mind bumping into the beauty of a sigh, the stillness of a prayer—the way it seeps into a morning like the smell of strong Italian coffee.
A few burrs on my soul? I’ll keep them. A whole coatful? No, thank you.
This is wrong, I know. You can’t have the good of God and the good of the world, too. You can’t hum I Have Decided to Follow Jesus in a low-cut lace top. And forget my Friday night gossip sessions—the three margaritas I’ll down in Mexico this March? Also condemned. I have to choose. God spits out lukewarm believers. They’re worse than sinners, or so I’ve been told.
On Monday, I turned 26. I spent the morning at the spa—met God in the dry sauna at the twelve-minute mark, no doubt about it. Then, in the evening, I went to a bar where the password to a dangerously good drink was your soul.
I turned 26 on Monday, and while that doesn’t entitle me to much wisdom yet, I do know this: life happens in the in-between. The cracks in the sidewalk. The hush before daybreak. The space between a kiss and turning a cheek. Maybe this is where we come alive. Maybe this is where the good stuff grows.
The more in-between we can tolerate, the deeper we can feel, taste, dance, and scream.
The world spills over with rust-reds, pinks, blacks, and purples. It would be a shame to save even one shade for heaven.
So this is my official call to redeem the lukewarm. I have one foot in the sinner’s circle and one foot in the saints’. They’re far from each other, I know. And while my inner thighs are hurting, like Laura Gilpin famously said, I get to enjoy twice the stars in the night sky.
Love,
Maria
If you enjoyed this essay, catch up on my previous ones here:
My mother can’t tell you the name of her great-grandmother
It’s not that we fled Mexico, it’s that something was chasing us
It’s not that I’m sober curious
It’s not that I don’t believe in God
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Upcoming! Next week’s craft lesson: How to Prepare for the Arrival of a Poem
A popular craft lesson from January: “The red item theory: how to write lived-in poems”.
I hear you, and I enjoyed your writing. Because the comments are on, I assume you are okay reading people’s reactions to your ideas.
I’m 42 now, ex-evangelical to reconstructing to kinda churchy again now, but in really different mindset … and I can totally tell you that God even loves lukewarm believers. I’m confident. Yes. We are in the in-between, already, not yet… my evangelical upbringing was an all or nothing mindset, but that is not a true belief, it’s coercion and “because I said so”. It’s not true faith. Beautiful thinks happen in the middle, like you said. The time between night and morning with the colors and the hope of a new day’s possibilities. I think my 30s were a big part of the transition to accepting grey areas. God is in the grey areas. But I wouldn’t compare God to a burr, because although burrs are seeds being dispersed away from the parent plant, they are annoying and sometimes thorny. I think it’s humans who are more like the seeds, being scattered by the passage of time, and we are the ones who grow in different places and reflect the image of the main plant. Like, I’m sure you are familiar with all the Vine and Branches metaphors that Jesus used and the church-speak on this kind of topic.
But anyway. God does not hate you (or me), and realizing that God isn’t mad at me helped me to shift mindset to deconstruction of my evangelical upbringing.
Also, there’s a great poetic thinker Christian thinker named Hannah Anderson and her book Humble Roots was what came to mind when I was reading your essay.
holy. holy. holy. your words are breath-taking.