"Have you ever seen the movie Titanic? Yeah, One Village coffee is NOTHING LIKE THAT. Their coffee is way better than anything White Star cruise lines would serve, and when it comes to partnership, they really know their stuff and would never leave you floating on a plank in the freezing Arctic Ocean. Eleven thumbs up, these guys are awesome."Jenn & Joe, Ebenezers Coffeehouse
Article for National Community Church's A1:8 March Newsletter
WHAT IT REALLY MEANS
I sit looking out at the corner of 2nd and F St NE, the same intersection I’ve looked at for years. Sometimes it’s raining; sometimes the sun is bouncing gold off the office buildings and splashing onto the back walls of the shop; sometimes amorphous bundled shapes are moving across the streets as snow falls from the sky. It’s always a little different and yet the same.
I sit looking out at the corner of 2nd and F St NE, the same intersection I’ve looked at for years. Sometimes it’s raining; sometimes the sun is bouncing gold off the office buildings and splashing onto the back walls of the shop; sometimes amorphous bundled shapes are moving across the streets as snow falls from the sky. It’s always a little different and yet the same.
This place runs through my bloodstream: the smell of beans ground to a dark pulp woven into the fabric of who I am in this eternal present. I’ve never wanted much, just LIFE–wide open, heart pounding, wonderful and extraordinary. I’ve spent the better part of the last decade looking for it only to realize through the wisdom of experience that it’s here with me. I’m in it, and it’s swirling around me, an ever present force.
I don’t know that anyone ever says, “I want to be a barista when I grow up.” It’s a rite-of-passage job. With a Starbucks anchoring down every tenth block in the US and even a corner on a small island off the coast of Greece (pieces of America have followed me everywhere), it’s rare to meet someone who hasn’t worked in a coffee shop. With NCC’s decision to open it’s own variety of Project Caffeinate America, I have to laugh at God’s propensity for the obvious. One of these days, He really will write on a billboard, and we’ll all be saying, “Why didn’t we see it before?”
When I started working at Ebenezers, I just needed a job. Life wasn’t making sense for about the thirty-first time in my mid-twenties, and I always liked the idea of being someone’s trendy coffee shop girl serving them their daily cup of joe. It worked for a while, and I could even stand the tedium of emptying the trash cans into which I’m convinced people purposefully upended their left-over coffee. But my heart grew dormant, and life lost the luster it had had on black rock beaches in Hawaii and in hardwood dance studios in Rockville. For all its vision and potential, NCC was just a church, my Sunday morning fare of choice, and Ebenezers just the place that issued my paycheck. My less than extraordinary existence was taking its toll on a heart that yearned with every beat for something more.
Whether out of desperation or inspiration, the next three years saw me playing planet Earth hopscotch. Eight months in Germany, two weeks in Greece, a week in Berlin, a couple of months in Mexico, a month in Colorado, another two weeks in Germany. I was in and out of DC so often, my friends were getting whiplash from watching me wave good-bye only to have me say “Oh hey what’s up” a few months later. I lost count of how many times someone said “You’re back!” and after two or three going away parties, we all just gave up. I’d be back. I always was. And I always tied on that apron again with the train engine on it and relegated myself to having a closet that smelled like I roasted my own beans.
It was on my second or third return that I heard Dick Foth say something about Ebenezers in one of his sermons that stuck with me. He said, “It isn’t just a coffee house. It’s a weigh station on the journey of life for weary travelers.” It was only then that I felt the enormity of what I was doing.
These brick and mortar walls not only help bring in funding for empowering women in Thailand to seek freedom from the sex trafficking industry; for training up children orphaned by AIDS and war in Uganda to be leaders in their communities; for building a coffee shop in Nicaragua to bridge the gap between the hearing and deaf populations; or for facilitating peace between two strife ridden groups in Isreal/Palestine. They also heal, and for those of us who may not engage in hands-on missions overseas, we see our own brand of discontent and weariness walk through these doors everyday. We may be one of the richest, most powerful countries in the world, but we are far from immune to darkness.
What we do here isn’t just about helping to build confidence in communities that crave self-sufficiency or flying a day to get muddy beside someone while laying bricks: it’s giving people belief in something bigger. It’s hope, it’s presence, it’s a mutual understanding that something is wrong, and we’re trying to fix it. I think in the midst of all of that, this place is also fixing me. It’s been a dance to which I’ve never forgotten the steps. Effortless and seamless, it breaks me and weaves me back together with an intentionality that could only be from my Creator.
When it began, it was an experiment. Over time, it has become a source of support for organizations and faces thousands of miles away that most will never see. But it’s also support for those faces that we do see: the ones whose orders we’ve memorized, whose families are our concern too, whose moods we can read by the way they ask for coffee. It’s support for those of us who put on that apron several times a week and are forging through the confusion of figuring out who we are. Empowerment means different things to different people. To me and countless others, it’s a building on the corner of F and 2nd St NE in Washington, DC.
