Tea and Paint

I guess there are things that seem to serve us, contribute to our lives... habits that are deeply ingrained so much that we don’t even notice when they don't serve us anymore.

The sun angles past the drop cloth curtain and makes the colorful book spines shine. I take a bite of my toast and am struck by the contrast of the warm bread and the cold marmalade hitting different parts of my tongue simultaneously. The bitter and sweet of the marmalade wakes up my brain, creating new connections. I sip my tea to wash it down, creamy with oat milk, sweet with honey, with that signature tea astringency blending it all together. I am suddenly intensely present in a way I haven’t been all week. 

The one-year-old boston terrier full of mischief and energy launches into full play mode, teasing our ten-year-old gray-muzzled boxer who mostly enjoys her company, but there are limits to his patience.  

I’ve had one of those weeks where I barely stopped moving. There was work to do, kids to shuttle places, food to make, long kid stories to listen to. And in the middle of that I caught a home improvement bug. It’s always bugged me that the railing for our staircase was painted white. Even though that was the trim color for everything else, it always seemed out of place. Fast forward a few years and few children later and this railing was in constant need of cleaning. But there’s only so many times you can magic eraser a handrail before the paint starts coming off of it. It struck me two nights ago that the handrail really needed to be a dark color. But our molding has been white for fifteen years and I was a little scared. Especially because I was certain that I couldn’t just paint the handrail, I needed to paint the whole banister. I of course pulled up pinterest projects and saw that plenty of people had done just what I was thinking of doing and it had turned out fine, so I took a deep breath and painted my banister a deep gray with green undertones. It is gorgeous and rich and saturated, and I loved it so much I instantly went out and got two more quarts of the same color so I can do the bench in my kitchen and the board and batten over the fireplace in the living room. I need more saturation in my life than I did fifteen years ago, I guess. 

There’s probably a bigger story emerging from that, but I’m mid-journey and so the rest remains to be seen. 

Perhaps it coincides with another shift that happened just as suddenly, but I think it had been coming for a while. I evidently don’t seem to really like coffee anymore. The change over happened all at once one sunday, but it had been in the works for a while and I didn’t realize it. I used to religiously drink at least two cups of black coffee every morning. Almost two decades ago I switched away from a coffee maker to a french press. Then a year or so ago, I switched to doing pour over coffee. I ground my own beans every morning, kept them in a dark air-tight container, doing all the things for the optimal cup. A few months ago I’d noticed I was hardly finishing my second cup. Just didn’t want it. Then I was only drinking part of my first cup. 

About a month ago, one Saturday I ground the last ground in my tin and thought, oh no, I won’t have coffee before church tomorrow. I’d intended to run out and get some, but the day wore on, and I remembered it in the evening. By then I was tired and ready to settle in for the evening and running out in the dark to the bright lights of the grocery store was the opposite of what I wanted to do. So I thought, it’s fine, I’ll just make tea. 

I’d developed a taste for Yorkshire tea while traveling in the UK last year. It’s basic, black proper tea and it’s a very good everyday cup. I’d been drinking it with a little sugar, but on a whim I decided to try it with a little honey and some oatmilk. It was like an epiphany. So I just didn’t buy any coffee for a while.  But surely I would go back right? 

Coffee has been basically a part of my personality for my entire adult life. I spent so much time at Starbucks in grad school that people would give me Starbucks merchandise as gifts. Several friends traveling abroad one year made a point of finding me those “city mugs” that the company was doing for a while. 

So this week I grabbed one of my usual bags at the grocery store and proceeded to make coffee the next morning. I didn’t even finish a cup. I poured it out and went and brewed a cup of tea instead. 

I guess there are things that seem to serve us, contribute to our lives, things that are in fashion like white trim that no one questions, habits that are deeply ingrained so much that we don’t even notice when they don’t work for us anymore. Breaking out of these things seems scary at first, but there are new colors to enjoy, new tastes to discover, and a much bigger world waiting on the other side of our fear and discomfort. 

This story is about mindsets. What is waiting for you outside of the way you’ve always done things? 

As a side note, I’m changing the name of this publication to Wild Thriving, and there will no longer be a separate section for that work because I think it’s all connected to finding the ways we get free. 

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“I wish I could still believe in God, but I can’t be a Christian anymore because of ______” Fill-in-the-blank with racism, misogyny, homophobia, toxic capitalism, and so on. I’ve had this conversation with different people almost word-for-word over and over. White American Christianity has so defined God that many people cannot separate God from the toxic theology they were taught.  

But this isn’t the God I see in the Bible. The Bible shows us a God meeting people where they are and nudging them towards justice and total thriving for all: shalom. The Bible details arcs of justice and societal reform. If we understand how radical those arcs were in the context of the day, we can extend them forward into the future and figure out how to work for justice, total thriving, and societal reformation in our day. 

I grew up in that first world view. Come along, and I’ll tell you the story of how I escaped, and I’ll show you a theology that I believe paints a more accurate picture: a faith for the common good where everyone thrives and no one is left out.

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Anna Elisabeth Howard writes highly caffeinated takes on shalom as a lens for everything from her front porch in Hendersonville, TN where she lives with her husband and two sons. She is a community organizer and movement chaplain with a background in youth and family ministry and is a graduate of Fuller Theological Seminary. An avid hiker and backpacker, many thoughts start somewhere in the middle of the woods, or under a waterfall. She is a regular contributer to Earth & Altar and her latest book is Inward Apocalypse: Uncovering a Faith for the Common Good.

Buy Inward Apocalypse: Amazon | Independent Booksellers

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