Good morning, how are you? Rested I hope. I’m at Starbucks in Green Hills today instead of Merridee’s. I had to drop Hutch off at school so I came over here because it’s closer. The atmosphere here is definitely different from that of the bakery. The customers seem more serious and into their laptops and their work. There are a couple of guys reading the paper and talking, and another couple having an awkward tea, but otherwise the climate is a little more private. I’m sharing an outlet with the guy across the table and we are not making conversation. The workers are happy though. They always seem to be in good moods. Maybe because they are getting paid to be at the coffee shop and the rest of us are paying to be here. Maybe it’s because they have health insurance.

“Grande, non-fat, one-pump, with-whip, mocha” the server says happily.

The guy sharing the outlet with me just walked off to the bathroom and left his laptop open on the table. It’s commonplace here, I do it all the time. My friends in Africa would never think of doing something so silly. When Matt was here from Zimbabwe I left my car unlocked while we went into a restaurant and he questioned me. “I never lock my doors,” I said. I told him that I leave my house for hours with the garage door raised and nobody ever bothers my stuff. He was amazed. He couldn’t get past his cultural conditioning of homes with tall concrete walls around them and security guards at public places.

If you listen to talk radio, especially “conservative” talk radio, America seems like a place of conspiracy and secret agendas; a place where things are slipping away into degradation and hopelessness and chaos. But here at the coffee shop, in the real world, things seem more pleasant. I realize that good and evil are at work everywhere and that there are surely things going on that I can’t see. But this is still a wonderful, charmed place and our generation is enjoying the benefits of the hard labor and struggle of our grandfathers on our behalf. So why the heck is everybody so serious? We’re meant to enjoy this freedom, Christians especially. We have the most profound freedom of all. And that eternal freedom was bought with blood and sweat and hot tears. To live or act like a slave, in any aspect, is to dishonor the sacrifice that was paid to free us.

“Tall, white-mocha, cappuccino, double-blended, no-whip”…