Episcopal Church Foundation Vestry Papers - for leading congregations

Most mornings when I wake up, my husband brings me a cup of coffee. When I’m at a hotel by myself, I make the coffee right after waking up.

My first morning in Memphis, I was mildly annoyed when I noticed the pot was missing from the coffee maker. There were packets of coffee, sugar and creamer, and cups, but no pot. I asked some of my colleagues and learned there were no coffee pots in their rooms either. What was the matter with this hotel? Didn’t they know the coffee pots were missing?

A chance remark on my third day in Memphis opened my eyes: single cup coffee machines. Of course! I had been so CERTAIN the coffee makers had pots that I was stuck in an old way of thinking and blind to other possibilities.

This experience made me stop and think: in what other areas of my life is certainty closing my mind to other possibilities? Where else am I stuck? And, where are we, as communities of faith, stuck in relation to doing what God is calling us to do in the world?

Yesterday I visited the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. I saw and heard references to the certainty of many white people, in the years leading up to 1968 and beyond, that discrimination and separate-but-equal were right.

A video depicting the struggle to integrate lunch counters caught and held my attention. I was sickened by the violence directed at the young African Americans courageous enough to sit at the ‘whites only’ lunch counters and the ugliness of the first person accounts of white people speaking from a place of certainty that integration was wrong.

Our certainty of how things should be – our certainty that we are RIGHT – is a learned behavior. And, one I believe is within our power to change. In my experience letting go of my certainty has allowed me to see and hear things I was closed to before.

If there is more than one way to be a coffee maker, and if, separate is not equal, imagine the countless ways God calls us into relationship once we open our eyes to see.