When I think about opening a coffee shop, my biggest hope is that it would be an opportunity for people to connect. For the old couple to read the Sunday paper together, the indie kids to smoke their cigarettes, the businessman to go an extra block out of his way to be a “regular”, or even a grad student to be by himself and connect with the solitude and French press coffee.

My biggest struggle with a chain coffee shop is also its biggest “strength”: They are everywhere. They consider this the best marketing plan on the face of the planet, and rightly so. Chains, like Starbucks, make tons on money and makes coffee easily accessible to millions of people. But if I wanted to simply provide coffee in my coffee shop, I would be failing to accomplish my hope of connecting people [not to say that people can’t connect at a Starbucks]. So… how do people connect?

A book from one of my counseling class says, “Relationships are often cemented by moving or hazardous adventures.” I think what this means is that a way people connect is by doing stuff together (particularly moving or hazardous). The truth is that we get to know someone is that we go through things with him or her: We suffer through 10th grade chemistry, go to concerts in the middle of the week, sky dive without our parents permission, or drink coffee together. Relationships don’t always paint such a beautiful picture. Sometimes we fail our chemistry class, the speakers blow out at the concert, or our shoot doesn’t open. What I am getting at is that “going through stuff together” is what develops relationships. And yes relationships are messy, but there is intimacy in the messiness.

In class the other day, my professor said that “there is intimacy in the messiness; there is value to conflict, causing connectiveness.” If God created us for relationships, which I wholly believe, God had to figure out a way for us to be in relationship with one another. God choose to connect us with one another the same way that he chose to connect us with Himself: messiness.

Think of the Gospel and its messiness on so many different levels. For one, the Gospel is messy because of how ridiculously messy the cross is. Jesus took on the entirety of our sin and bore it alone on the cross…all of our shame, all of our messiness…He bled out on the cross. More specifically, the way that we connect with God is through a [messy] relationship with Christ. Though we deserved the messy death that Christ died, our relationship is pretty messy with Him (messy in a good way). Trying to explain the Gospel in itself even gets messy. But when understood, that messiness…the life that comes out of the Gospel’s messiness… brings us into a relationship with the living God. God created a way to be a just God and deal with injustice (our sin). But when picked apart, the messiness is absolutely beautiful. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, God connects with us; He loves us and creates a way for us to love Him back.

Okay…Okay… so how does all that connect with becoming a counselor to open up a coffee shop? Honestly, I think that in order to understand community, you must understand how people connect. We connect over coffee, not just for coffee. We connect over coffee filled with stories and life experiences bringing us into relationships. Relationships are not formed through one conversation, or cup of coffee, but many conversations and lots of coffee. With that said, in order to connect people together (particularly in a coffee shop), there needs to be more than coffee. There needs to also be a giving of yourself…thus beginning a messy relationship leading to connectiveness.

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