Barista for Jesus?

We have a God who possesses a great sense of humor. Let me tell you about the jokes he told me today :)

I went to meet with Pastor Trish of the Chicago Dream Center. Dream Center is the ministry that the Rose of Sharon program is based in. My meeting with Trish was to get plugged in as a volunteer. For my apprenticeship, I get to volunteer with a church ministry about twenty hours a week.

Those of you that know me well know that I am quite the planner and quite idealistic as well. Sometimes these qualities serve me well- and sometimes, like today, the expectations that they create get totally dashed by the real world.

I went into this meeting wanting to work in the residential teen program. Of course, in the real world of at-risk youth, even a girl as positive and upbeat as me can't just plug into a ministry like that. These things take time, and the girls deserve to have the volunteers that work with them be carefully screened and monitored. Because of that, just waltzing into the teen center was not an option.

Luckily, Trish is a wise woman and knows where to use even starry-eyed optimists like me. She explained to me that the cafe that New Life/the Dream Center runs needs someone to come in and help out and just provide good customer service. She told me that the girls from the center hang out there a lot, as well as random people from the community. Furthermore, it will help free up the woman that works with the girls so that she doesn't have to try and be in two places at once. Obviously this was not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to do youth ministry. And yet the possibilities that working in the cafe presents me are so exciting. Meeting all sorts of people from Humboldt Park, not just the church, learning how to make all my favorite coffee drinks, combining ministry with simple customer service- there are so many neat opportunities that can come out of this partnership.

The biggest "joke" in this whole thing is that I spent so much time bemoaning my life at Bath and Body Works. Not that I didn't enjoy it- truthfully, I think of all the retail establishments I could have worked at, it was definitely the best. But I was always very adamant that BBW was simply a time filler, nothing more. I was going into the "real world" to do "real ministry." How ironic then, that the very ministry God decides to place me in is an offshoot of my time in retail. How amazing that I spent a year selling bath soaps, and yet I was being trained to do something bigger, but using the same skills. How fortunate that I had to learn to exercise some degree of patience with suburban housewives who were rude to me. It almost gives me chills to think that the whole time I was dreaming of doing my life's work, God had a plan for me that would draw off of the very experiences that I was labeling insignificant.

I always figured BBW was that job I would do and never look back on. I assumed that it would have no impact on my future ministry.

I guess that joke is on me... :)