A friend sent the following to me. It certainly says
a lot about life and our relationship to what God
really gives us in a simple but effective way.

Perhaps I also like it because it is about a university
professor. I too enjoy sitting around with students
and "shooting the breeze."

PEACE!
Nancy

************
A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into
complaints about stress in work and life.

Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee.

When all the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress.

Be assured that the cup itself adds no quality to the coffee.  In most cases it is just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink.

What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups...and then you began eyeing each other's cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee; the jobs, money and position in society are the cups.  They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live.

Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us."

God brews the coffee, not the cups..........enjoy your coffee.

I like that story! It's almost like the story of the coffee bean, carrot and egg.

A girl was complaining about how "life was unfair", you know, the usual complaints a girl tells her mother.

The mother takes the girl into the kitchen, and starts to boil some water in pots. In those pots, one she put some carrots, the other an egg, and the last one, some coffee beans.

After they boied a while, she took them off the stove and examined each one.

The carrots, though they started out strong, came out mushy and soft. We are like that too. We may be strong at first, but as we get ourselves into hot water, that is, hard trials, we become weak and mushy.

The egg started out with a hard exterior and a soft inside. Though it still has that appearance of a hard and strong exterior, it now has a hard interior. Our trials has hardened our hearts.

The coffee beans however was still pretty much the same as they always were. But the water has changed, it became a drinkable brew that anyone can enjoy. The water became strong and drinkable and the coffee bean is still a coffee bean.

When we are going through trials, we should change our surroundings, not allow the surroundings (hot water) to weaken or harden our hearts.

We often let sickness and hard times to weaken our hearts where we don't have the energy or courage anymore to change the world around us. Our bodies are "our world" we can change too. Our minds, our bodies, our attitudes are all in our control. God wants to help us, but we allow the hot water we got into (not always our fault) to destroy us. Our sin is not the trouble, but our attitudes (that separate us from God) that keep us from overcoming and changing our surroundings.

Healing of heart and mind and body comes from our humble attitude towards God. But even when God decides to let us move on from this world through sickenss, do we change the world for the better before we move on? The coffee bean is usually used once, then tossed out, but we still enjoy the brew long after.

Boyd Allen
"May the Lord protect our nudity from the sight of those who will not benefit, and may he allow us to be seen by those who will."