Tea, Without Poison

a weekly devotional for spring

Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash

Thank you for joining us! Before we begin our devotional, I wanted to share a Comment Highlight from last week:

Sarah K. Lenz wrote in our Lenten Feelings thread:

“My favorite Lent resource is https://ccca.biola.edu/lent/ the Biola University Devotional. If you sign up they email you a daily devotional with readings, artwork, poetry, and music. It's really reflective and immersive.”

Thank you for the recommendation, Sarah! Sarah writes a fantastic newsletter called Spirit, which you can read here!

If you want to be featured in next week’s Comment Highlight, all you have to do is post a comment on any of this week’s posts or threads. That’s it!

Now, on with this week’s devotional…

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can you make tea
for an enemy
without slipping poison into it?

can you meet their eyes
when you hand them
the steaming cup, 

and do you notice 
their fingers 
shaking?

how many cups
of tea
(without poison)
have you been given, 

and do you remember
the way
you wept
when you realized
that we all just want to find home?

Heroism and helplessness have a strange relationship.

We like to think of heroism as a lack of weakness, and helplessness as weakness personified. But in practice, we know this isn’t so.

For example, it takes courage to lay down your weapons—either real or metaphorical—and surrender. And it takes just as much courage to see your enemy laying down their weapons and choose to give them mercy, not a slap.

Both of these types of courage require a certain level of helplessness. An understanding that we’re all, at our core, the same. We’re all looking for a home we’ve lost, and feel we cannot find. No matter how angry, cruel, bitter, or desperate someone acts toward us, it comes from the same basic place: the frightening feeling of being lost.

For Christians, the idea of a Helpless Hero should not be new to us. We pray to one; it does not get more helpless, nor heroic, than God-become-Man, nailed to a cross to mend the rift between humans and Creator that left us homeless, stranded.

But no matter your beliefs, we find our way home in the daily sacrifices made all around us. The way friends sacrifice for friends, family for family, communities for communities. And yes, on unique and powerful occasions that have the ability to ripple throughout time, enemies for enemies.

We have the opportunity this week to make cups of tea, unpoisoned, to extend to those we care the least for. To look into their eyes and see only a being without a home, someone lost and looking. Someone just as afraid as we often are.

Your act of mercy may not be reciprocated. But that’s not the point. This is your opportunity, not theirs. And who knows what that one cup of tea may inspire in them someday?

Whose shaking hands need that cup of tea, this week? Into whose eyes can you look and see the desire for home?

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