The title comes from a conversation I had on Threads yesterday. Starbucks was talking about their hot tea. I replied, “as good as the hot tea is, the green iced tea is insane. Good on you.” I got a like from Starbucks and said, “now that I’ve got your attention, could I sweet talk you into offering a Moroccan mint iced tea as well?” They did not reply to that, so I am guessing the answer is “no.” I tried, people. I tried for all of us.
I think I’m just going to talk about funny conversations that have happened with me recently, because I don’t have a writing prompt to jog old memories.
The first is that I go to bed earlier than Zac, and he always says goodnight to me when he’s going to bed, so I wake up with messages and cute memes. This morning, it was this gem:
“Dr Pepper is BBQ Sprite.”
It reminds me of grilling out in the backyard with Dana, because the first time we grilled for my dad, I made a Dr Pepper BBQ sauce.
My friend Tiina posts these really funny memes about Finland and as I told her, “every time I see a fact about Finland, I learn that I don’t have much Finnish blood (according to Lindsay’s DNA results, 3%), but I do have a Finnish personality. This week, it has been learning that it’s “comma fucker” in Suomi and not “grammar Nazi.”
I was walking around Trader Joe’s looking for some lunch and realized I needed some coffee. I walk up to this cute black guy who was probably in his early 20s. He has a thick African accent (not sure which country), and I ask him what the best coffee is. He picks the Ethiopian and I say, “is that because you’re from Ethiopia?,” laughing. He looked sheepish even though I was only teasing him, so I said that my grandfather’s favorite was Ethiopian and I already knew I liked it.
My grandfather’s favorite coffee was Kenya AA. I didn’t lie to the kid. I remembered that when I was writing down the story. I feel bad that I told an Ethiopian kid my grandfather’s favorite coffee was Ethiopian when it just came from Africa somewhere…. 🙄 My brain just got scrambled in trying to keep this kid’s feelings from being really hurt…. that a genuine lighthearted teasing moment wouldn’t become a dart of some kind. I bought exactly what the kid recommended and now I have coffee I don’t really like that much and it’s not the kid’s fault at all. It’s because I forgot that Ethiopian is a mid-dark roast.
It’s more like a heavy black tea than coffee to me, and of course is LOADED with caffeine because dark roasts have less (caffeine leeches out of the beans the longer you roast them). So, I will put up with it for a pound and then go get some French Roast. However, I think my dad is coming next weekend (or something like that, I haven’t received flight info- he travels spur of the moment with all his FF miles). He prefers dark roast, too (Komodo Dragon from Starbucks), but the Ethiopian coffee is so delicate that I want him to try it as well.
“Delicate” is the word I use for coffee that’s not strong enough to stand up to creamer in terms of flavor profile. Like, when you put milk in it, all you can taste is milk because it covers up anything the coffee is bringing. I drink medium roasts with a little simple syrup, no creamer. Medium roast is also sweet and smooth enough not to need sugar….. but not all medium roasts are created equally. Maxwell House is also a medium roast. Two schools of thought there. You can either load it up with milk and sugar so that it doesn’t taste like Maxwell House, or leave it black in hopes of finding some actual coffee flavor somewhere.
Why am I picking on Maxwell House?
None of those coffees are bad. We just bag on them because they’re not GREAT. They’re not supposed to be GREAT. They’re supposed to be affordable. The one truly great coffee that’s better, to me, than any expensive coffee in the world is Cafe Bustelo. It’s a Cuban roast and it’s cheap as shit. Yet, you go to a Cuban restaurant and it’s all they serve because it’s actually from Cuba, or the original roast is. I am guessing that they moved some of their plants to Florida or something because I do not believe that we have a coffee sold nationally in the US that was actually grown in Cuba.
Cigars are the same way. You can’t get Cuban cigars in America unless they’re old as SHIT because they’ve been sitting around since before the embargo. I think I got a Cuban cigar in town town Portland for like, three dollars because it was pre=embargo. It was okay.
Then, I went to Ottawa.
I went to Ottawa on a road trip with Kathleen, my then-wife. We were living in DC and Ottawa was not that far a leap. While we were there, I realized that I could buy Cuban cigars. I counted up my money. I only had enough money for one of them. I bought it for my dad. The trouble was how we were going to get it to him.
I hid it in the springs under the driver’s seat in my car.
Not as hard as advertised, but this was in 2001. I figured that even if I did get caught, it wouldn’t be that big a deal because it was one cigar, not hundreds. I also know that Canadian jails are nicer than ours. It was worth the risk.
I asked my dad to help me decorate my office, and he had me take pictures of the space so he could get an idea of what needed to be done before he got here. He asked me what I wanted my office to look like, and anyone who’s seen my dad’s office knows why I would say “I want it to look just like yours.” Thankfully, his next words were “well, that’s pretty easy to do, actually.”
In terms of trinkets and knickknacks, I know I want to display all my books from Team Mendez, Traci Walder, and Henri Nouwen. I am now laughing about what it looks like when your special interests are intelligence and theology. 😉 I am the holy and the moly all by myself.
It’s amazing how they feed each other, though. So many Biblical stories are well-illustrated with stories about spies. This is because in Jesus’ time, there was no Christianity. They were rebel Jews. They HAD to use tradecraft, and use it well.
The ichthus, or sign of the fish, is one such intelligence operation.
Because it was an intelligence operation, it’s the only Christian tattoo I have. It is important to me as an intelligence operation now, but back then I decided that I wanted to mark myself as a Christian, but I never wanted to wear or promote the cross ever again. Ever in my lifetime. That’s because it will be a cold day in hell before his death instrument means more to me than the way he lived.
If you didn’t grow up in the church, you’re probably wondering what this “intelligence operation” actually is…. or maybe you grew up in a church where they didn’t tell you this story, and you’re going to call up your childhood pastor and say, “why didn’t I know this?” 😉
In the days directly following Jesus’ death, the disciples were rightfully scared they’d be executed as zealots, too. Christianity went into the wind, and everyone developed this piece of tradecraft. You would drag your sandal in an arc. If the other person was a Christian, they would make an arc with their sandal in the other direction, completing the ichthus. We survived underground with oral tradition for a very, very long time. And in fact, most of the Gospels being written down was people being able to write them down….. A LOT of history was oral vs. written back then. Christians are not unique.
However, because it was so long between the oral tradition and written, there are no eyewitness accounts to things like The Sermon on the Mount. It is possible that Jesus could be a fictional person, not that he never lived, but that he lived in many, many people. The INFJ personality is a thousand years old when it is born, yet I am not the only person who has it. It is not impossible that Jesus could be an amalgamation of the personality type, and not one single man.
However, if you believe the story the way it happened, that is okay, too, because I am just spitballing as to what makes the most sense in the modern day and age. I could be, and often am, wrong. Something an atheist said has stuck with me so profoundly that I cannot help but wonder if my assessment is accurate…. that Jesus was not the only person claiming to be the Messiah at the time…….. his was just the story that stuck.
Now I want to carve “the story that stuck” into the topiary hedges in front of my house. God, that’s such a good line. Again, I am FURIOUS I didn’t think of it first.
I am going to the place of Jesus being many people because the historical Jesus is known as an INFJ. If the kind of pastoral care that he exhibits is an actual personality type (most of us end up as pastors, professors, grade school teachers, social workers, etc.), then Jesus is not limited to one body.
But then again, Jesus never was.
He was always designed to be an idea, not a person. Even if Jesus is just one person and you tell the story exactly the way it traditionally goes, God designed Jesus to be an idea and not a person. When he ascended, he began to live in all of us.
When we struck him down, he became more powerful than we could possibly imagine.
I don’t think Jesus ever thought there would be divided camps over his messaging, though. That Evangelicals would twist his message so violently (see: prosperity gospel) that it would take another underground intelligence operation to save the church from itself. And it’s not even that it’s an underground intelligence operation. It’s that Evangelicals are so loud they’re trying to drown out the voices of the disinherited.
They’re trading Martin Luther King, Jr. for Joel Osteen.
They’re treating Christian presidents like Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter like trash and glorifying Donald Trump.
It’s sickening, and it’s why I hope my words are adding to the discussion about what it means to be Christian in America. Evangelicals are so toxic, the most powerful out of malice and the rest out of idiocy.
Christianity is better than that, but if the Evangelicals continue, the church will die. People will get too tired of the hypocrisy and leave in droves. It is already happening, and I am saying that the tide will keep turning. I have met too many people who say that they’re emotionally recovering from what their churches did to them not to believe this is the case. The world is changing too fast for them to course correct.
There is a new intelligence game afoot. The traditional church is dying, so the rest of us are trying to find a new shape in which to drag our sandals.