photo © 2006 Ahmed Rabea | more info (via: Wylio)It's 8:07 AM. The kids have been roused, dressed, fed, and sent off to school. The dishes have been emptied from the dishwasher and the first load of laundry is spinning in the basement. My kettle begins to whistle and my French press is sitting with a belly full of Mocha Java waiting to be bathed in hot water. I sit down at my laptop, fire up TweetDeck and pull up my favorite hashtag column.
The first rule of #coffeeclub is that you definitely talk about #coffeeclub. Because our primary goal is to get this hashtag trending.
The first rule of #coffeeclub is that you definitely talk about #coffeeclub. Because our primary goal is to get this hashtag trending.
#Coffeeclub is truly one of my favorite parts of each day. Every morning we gather around our computers with our cups of coffee (or in some cases, heaven forbid, cups of TEA!) and share a few moments of our lives. We share struggles, prayer requests, recipes, health updates, and opinions on the classiness of donkey balls vs. trucknutz.
I love this time at least partly because I feel a strong sense of belonging with these women (and the odd man that braves the waters!). We may be scattered all around, have vastly different backgrounds and life circumstances, but we "get" one another.
There is something tremendously powerful about being understood.
I believe that regardless of how popular we were or are, there's not one of us who hasn't felt on the outside at least occasionally. As an adult, I thought all of the cliques and popularity contests would be left behind, but often they still continue. If anything, they can sometimes be even more brutal as adults than they were as when we were kids because now your acceptance is tied not to hair styles and clothes, but to things like "values" and "morals." I'm constantly baffled by the number of people I meet who have made it through the fires of adolescence only to be burned by other adults for not following just the right set of beliefs or loving the right kind of person or aligning with the correct political world view. Now instead of name-calling like "freak" or "nerd," your core values are questioned. Maybe you don't really love God. Perhaps you don't really love America. You don't fit in. You're an outsider.
But maybe, just maybe, we can change the tone. Maybe we can say no to name calling. Maybe we can accept people who don't believe the same things we believe or act the same way we act or dress the same way we dress. Maybe we can spend a little more energy focusing on our similarities rather than our differences.
Because that other stuff? Well, as we say in #coffeeclub, that stuff sucks donkey balls.
Do you have a group that "gets" you? Do you have an opinion on trucknutz?
I love this time at least partly because I feel a strong sense of belonging with these women (and the odd man that braves the waters!). We may be scattered all around, have vastly different backgrounds and life circumstances, but we "get" one another.
There is something tremendously powerful about being understood.
I believe that regardless of how popular we were or are, there's not one of us who hasn't felt on the outside at least occasionally. As an adult, I thought all of the cliques and popularity contests would be left behind, but often they still continue. If anything, they can sometimes be even more brutal as adults than they were as when we were kids because now your acceptance is tied not to hair styles and clothes, but to things like "values" and "morals." I'm constantly baffled by the number of people I meet who have made it through the fires of adolescence only to be burned by other adults for not following just the right set of beliefs or loving the right kind of person or aligning with the correct political world view. Now instead of name-calling like "freak" or "nerd," your core values are questioned. Maybe you don't really love God. Perhaps you don't really love America. You don't fit in. You're an outsider.
But maybe, just maybe, we can change the tone. Maybe we can say no to name calling. Maybe we can accept people who don't believe the same things we believe or act the same way we act or dress the same way we dress. Maybe we can spend a little more energy focusing on our similarities rather than our differences.
Because that other stuff? Well, as we say in #coffeeclub, that stuff sucks donkey balls.
Do you have a group that "gets" you? Do you have an opinion on trucknutz?
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