I am a member (and leader, I suppose) of a small community of the King centered around Joe’s Addiction coffee shop in Oklahoma City. The shop is actually in a small town called Valley Brook, a “Lesotho style” incorporated town within the surrounding environs of Oklahoma City. Valley Brook exists for one reason and one reason only; to nurture and propel the businesses that thrive on the sexual exploitation of women as far into perpetuity as they can.
But that’s another post; back to Joe’s…
One of the most popular pass-times there is to play a card game called skip-bo. Pretty much everybody plays and since it’s a low-stress game, or intended to be anyway, it offers an opportunity to sit around, engage in light competition, and great conversation over, you guessed it, a crazy good cup of coffee.
Because of the pervasiveness of the game within the community, we have long sought to have a fun tournament at the coffee shop. However, the questions of exactly how to organize the tournament and determine who advances, etcetera went unanswered until recently. On an anonymous day in February, 2015, I and two other members of our community sat down and laid out a workable plan on how to organize and run a skip-bo tournament. Thus was born “Skip-Bo Super Bowl 1.”
Those of us who sat down and organized the tournament also looked at the costs that would be associated with it. They were, to be honest, quite staggering in relation to the financial resources of this community. We thought we would have, maybe, 20 people sign up, and if that were the case, we would need 40 decks of skip-bo cards. At approximately $8.00 each online (which is the cheapest option), that meant that we would already be spending more money on cards alone than the money we expected to bring in from people signing up to play. It would take more money than we initially anticipated to pull this thing off. On top of that, we wanted a nice prize for the people who came in 1st and 2nd. Local thrift shops have used trophies, and we could get two of those fairly inexpensively and that would be fine.
We decided that in order to help offset the fiscal outlay we would experience, we would charge everybody a $5.00 entry fee. Whoops.
We have a fairly large number of homeless people in our community at Joe’s, but even so, we were certain that even the most destitute of them could come up with a way to earn $5.00 if they really wanted to play in the tournament.
What happened instead was that one of the people who is currently “couch surfing” for a place to sleep each night threatened to report us to local government officials for running a gambling operation. Another local resident, who is much more peripheral to the core community at Joe’s, threatened to do essentially the same thing, only her threat was to go to one of the local pimps who holds sway over the local town council and report us for running said gambling operation.
I had a conversation with the owner of the shop and we decided that we would scrap the $5.00 entry fee, and that the Valley Brook Vineyard Church, with whom we are associated, would pick up whatever costs were involved. I therefore reprinted all of the advertising flyers to say that the tournament was free, put them up, and returned the money already collected to its rightful owners.
Was I pissed off when I heard about those threats? You’re damned right I was; especially at the couch surfer whom we have fed and cared for years now; offering him refuge from the world outside, supplying him with free tents, several bicycles, free food when we can come up with it, and free coffee on a daily basis. I have even invited him to stay the night in my home during severely cold winter weather.
Though the initial level of anger I experienced subsided fairly quickly, I was still determined to talk to him about his threat the next time I saw him. I wanted to tell him how disappointed I was in him that he would threaten us with such action simply because, as I saw it, he didn’t want to get up off of his ass and earn $5.00 to help out.
Yesterday afternoon changed all of that. I had a “textversation” with another of the people with whom I sat down and organized the tournament. He was incredibly angry and even though these threats against the shop were almost a week old, his anger was growing and not subsiding.
It didn’t take long for me to see my own anger in his and seek repentance.
I began to counsel him that his anger was misplaced and that the people who made the threats of reporting our “gambling operation” were already experiencing the fruits of their actions. It was not up to us to make things harder on them. Their actions are now well known throughout the community and neither of them have been to the coffee shop since Monday, March 16th. I think this is especially hard on the couch surfer. The local resident only comes to the shop every so often.
The person to whom I was speaking about all of this, and whose anger began to worry me told me flat out “…Joe’s will never reach it’s full potential until it rids itself of these parasites.” At this point I began to really feel guilty about my own anger and scheduled lack of forgiveness. I replied thusly: “A parasite is an animal that feeds off of the life force of another, but Joe’s is not about biology. It’s about forgiveness and acceptance for all. We all need it and [name deleted] will need it from you and me. It won’t be easy, but it will be necessary. Not for how being forgiven will change him…it may not change him…but it will change us, and that’s the important thing here.”
At that point he was having none of my Jesus logic, but, having seen the error of my own anger, I persisted. Sure enough, it didn’t take long for him to begin to soften his attitude, and though he never admitted his intent to forgive or love those he saw as his enemies, I could sense something greater: Just as I had seen my own faults in his anger, he began to see his faults in theirs.
Therein lies the lesson. When we take the time to see our own faults in the imperfections of others, we learn forgiveness, enemy love, and, perhaps, we inch just a little bit closer to coming before God as the children we are. It is in caring for and forgiving people we see has having wronged us that we grow closer to God, and it is only in these things that a place like Joe’s (like us) actually reaches its full potential.
Peace,
Niemand