The Coffee Parable

The Coffee Parable:


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.

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 but 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, 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 began eyeing each other's cups.

Now consider this: Life is the coffee, and 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.

How true...but then again wouldn't it be nice to have a gold cup? hahahah...

Truth is, Jesus has given us the gold cup to put our coffee in, it is just that despite the gold cup that we already have, we still eye other cups which is inferior to what we have now. There lies the problem of the lack of contentment in our lives.

We have to be contented with the things that we have NOW. The friends that we have, the jobs that we do, the family we enjoy with, the house that we stay NOW.

The problem as I want to share personally is that despite being contented sometimes (yeah I am not completely contented...i am still dreaming about my car..at first was Mazda RX-8, then VW Golf GTI, Mitsubishi i and now Suzuki SX4...sooner or later I will downgraded myself to a motorcycle), there are also people around you that are not contented so much so there are a lot of pressures to perform to other's expectations.

And even if expectations are met, the problem lies in the other people's level of contentment. Sometimes things that are ok with you is not ok with people and vice versa.

It is true that we want the best of everything in life and it is ok to have good things in life. Actually our want to be at a better level in life does speaks of the need to have an environment that we will be happy in. It also speaks of our sinful nature as human beings because we are supposed to be in a better position as designed by God.

I do not know how to put this across well...deep down, I know that this world can be so much better than it is now but it has fallen short in so many areas. So even if we are in a better position, like staying in Singapore, we can lose sight of it all and complain like there is no tomorrow.

Jesus teaches that those who wants to keep their life will lose it and those who lose their life will keep it. It got me thinking a long time ago. I just started to realise.

It is by giving your life to Jesus, you are able to give up your expectations that you impose on yourself and on other people. You are able to be contented with what you have thereby gaining life so to say. If you keep your life, your expectations, you tenacity to get the good things in life, you lose the focus of what it is to have a good life, thereby losing your 'life' in that sense.

Thanks to the sister who shared this as I am sharing what I am reflecting on my working life these past few weeks. I realised that there's only so much one can do in a job, the rest of it is really depends on God's fantastic grace.

The issue that confronts me and most of us is that you do what you can, others in the company thinks that more can be done, even if doing it does not improve the situation unless it is God's plan. So either we choose to live in stress or to live in rest; i choose to live in the later and sometimes it requires some heart wrenching decision to do so. I think to lose sight of it all is a greater loss than to hang on and depend on your own strength.

But God is out to take care of us and each day will be better than the previous. We are to be contented what we have today because it is better than yesterday and definitely 10 years ago (student = no income), however we are also to look forward to a better day, with a better hope because we have God as our Father in heaven.

Therefore: Be Contented but also look forward to better things, that is the hope we have in God.