Yesterday I wrote about
bad coffee, and blamed it on the people who made the coffee machine. I had an
encounter with the inventor of that machine about 25 years ago.
It’s a really good
invention. It’s the machine where you put water in a reservoir and coffee in a
basket. The machine pumps the water up from the reservoir and runs it through
the coffee and it drips down into the pot, provided the pot is centered
correctly. It even has a hold mechanism so if you need coffee really bad and
pull the pot out to pour yourself an early cup, it won’t let the coffee drip
out until you put the pot back in place, if you do it quickly enough. Makes
really good coffee.
I was on the Board of
Ministry of our conference. Candidates for ministry came before us, and it was
our responsibility to decide if their call to ministry was genuine. The
inventor of the machine came before us. We wondered why. He was sixty years old
and looked tired. Why start working at a new job when you had made millions by
inventing a coffee machine that was universally used?
Well, it turned out that
he had made nothing off that invention. He worked for the company. They owned
all his inventions and innovations. All he made was his salary. Except the
company had decided it was making enough money it no longer needed him and so they
praised him for his past work but said they had to “let him go.”
That’s such a nice
euphemism, isn’t it, letting someone go. It sounds like you’re just giving them
freedom… the freedom to starve.
So he now wanted to be a
preacher, so he and his family would have a place to live-parsonage-and a way
to buy food, even though a pastoral salary would be minimal, and not have to
work very hard, since he really was old and worn out.
That’s not the reason he
gave us, of course. He tried to create a story of “call,” but his heart wasn’t
really in it.
After all the questions
and answers and discussion, we sat there in awkward silence. We all felt sorry
for him. No one wanted to turn him down. But it was clear that he did not have
“the gifts and graces” for ministry, nor did he have the right motivation. He
was a good coffee machine inventor; he would not be a good pastor.
As usual, or at least
often, it fell to me to be the one with bad news. I started by thanking him for
his work on behalf of all of us, pointing out that even the coffee we were
drinking at that meeting came through his invention. Before I had gotten very
far, with a sigh, he stood, heavily, and, without a word, walked out. He knew
what praise for past work meant.
JRMcF
I tweet occasionally as
yooper1721. A “yooper” is a citizen of the upper peninsula of MI, where we
lived for 8 years, and where I started this blog, as reflections on faith not
only for the years of winter but “from a place of winter,” because the UP is
north of WI and quite a bit of Canada, and winter is 13 months long every year.
This morning, in southern Indiana, it is 16 degrees. I feel like a yooper
again.
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