The other day, about 11 a.m., the coffee filter folded over as the water dripped into it. I didn’t know until I took the first sip of what was, to my taste, brown water. Because I’d been looking forward to a good cup of coffee, and because the folded filter was clearly my fault, I was frustrated. “It’s that kind of day.”

And the whole time I’ve been writing, I’ve been thinking of some of my friends who don’t drink coffee, who wouldn’t use a drip coffee maker, who don’t like the brand of coffee I use.

And so, of course, at every level, in the way I was thinking, in the way I drink coffee, I’m failing.

+++

I was always uncertain when preparing hospital chapel messages. The first of ten hospital Easters, I was late to the service because I had been watching heart compressions. They worked, I went. But that shaped every service, and every Easter service. I never knew what would be happening right before chapel, what might be happening in the ED or in a hospice room. I avoided platitudes, promises that might feel hollow in the moment.

Before one Easter, perhaps early in COVID, I read something like this:

“On Easter we proclaim the resurrection. We don’t need to persuade or provide proofs or amuse people.”

It helped me that year. And sometimes I remember it. When the coffee filter fails, when I’m doing it wrong compared to what I think people might expect, when there’s a death in the other room, the underlying truth is this: Christ is risen from the dead.

We may not know what it means, but we do have the means to ask him.