Caffeinated Christianity

is a weird version of the Christian life we all are living.

Every day I realize how dependent on myself I am the moment I open my eyes.

I don’t know how your mornings go, but typically my mornings go a little like this:

I wake up to my alarm blaring, hit snooze, slowly get up, make my way to the kitchen to make some coffee, and then I’ll move from my bed to the couch for a little while. From there, I don’t dare start my day until my self-prescribed caffeine hits my system—without it I’m definitely more grumpy than you would probably think.

Now most of you probably read that order of events and thought it sounded familiar, because it probably does. But, the more thought I put into it the more I realize that perhaps my need for caffeine in the first place was due to me overworking myself for a season, and now I’m basically addicted to the thing that was supposed to be only a temporal bandage on my own self-made wound.

Yet that isn’t what happened. Time went on, as did my reliance on caffeine to keep me going on long days of work. Where once I would normally feel fatigued, now I don’t really feel anything. Instead of things getting better, it sorta feels like my days are just one big arduous task that never truly has an end to it, I just tend to give up for the day.

But what about resting? I thought that my God promised me rest! If I’m supposed to feel rested with Him, how is it that I ended up in such a precarious situation in the first place? Put simply: He was just along for the ride that I was taking Him on.

You see, at no point had I ever thought that maybe I wasn’t supposed to be striving for the things I was striving for every day. I assumed, selfishly, that God wanted me to have the greatest of the great, and all of my dreams to come true. So day in and day out I would push myself more and more trying to force God’s hand. “At some point He’ll reach down and make things happen!” I foolishly thought.

And well, He did make things happen. He brought amazing people into my life, one of them being my amazing wife. In spite of all of the things I was doing to make things work my own way, God still worked in the ordinary, reaching down into the mundane life I so hated, and brought out of it the most beautiful things that I have been blessed with to date.

My wife would tell you that sometimes I am my own worst enemy. I worry about things all too much. “But what if…?” I often ask her as she tries to calm me down, against my want to calm down. My brain wants solutions, her words want to give me peace. Sometimes those two things don’t fit together in the way that we would assume.

When I used to cry out for my God to reach down and help me, I imagined that the literal hand of God would be visible and do the miraculous. I would know it was Him because I wouldn’t be able to explain it. And while I still can’t explain it, it turns out that He moved in my life in the most non-miraculous of ways. As I think He does with yours as well.

My wife being there for me, to me, often feels like Jesus meeting me after watching me doing all sorts of stupid stuff every single day. When I worry, she calms me down. When I do something dumb and ask for forgiveness, she is quick to give it. When I need a helping hand, she is there to assist me. When I need reminded that I’m not a lost cause, there she is to cheer me on and promise that my worth is not found in what I do but in Christ.

God meets every single one of us face to face every single day. Most of the time we are just too busy to realize it. In our caffeine driven and weary minds we think that we can work our way up to force God to do what we want, but He has already set into place exactly what we need: a Savior that offers us unending love. Sometimes the characteristics of that savior come down and look at us face to face, we just miss it because we expect God to be high in the sky, only sending down miracles like lightning bolts.

My friend, God loves you and wants to meet you face to face today. Just look around at all that He has given you. Why keep exhausting yourself to try to prove Him wrong?