beans and gas 4.April.2008

It’s painful to pay over $47 to fill the car up with gas, like I did yesterday.  It makes a family want to research alternative modes of transportation.  Kyle and I have been looking into DART, Dallas’s public transit system.  For a daily pass of only $3, Isaiah and I can catch a nearby bus to the train station and ride to our MOPS meeting at church this morning.  The downside is it takes a little longer; the upside — I get to hold and pay attention to Isaiah the whole way.  As soon as I get familiar with the routes I need to take, I don’t think it’ll be a tough decision to choose public transit.

 Gas prices are clearly effecting grocery prices, too.  Duh.  I don’t need to tell you that.  I had vegetable beef soup on the menu this week.  It’s a good comfort food, and I had a nice loaf of fresh multigrain bread my friend and I baked I wanted to eat with it.  I usually use a beef roast in my soup, but when I got to the meat case, I couldn’t find any roasts under $15.  Fifteen bucks for a roast?  I couldn’t make myself do it. 

Here’s a thought:  it’s probably all the demand for ethanol that’s making corn prices go up, which in turn is making beef cost more to produce, since corn is all CAFO cows eat these days.  So beef has got corn prices and gas prices against it. 

On a whim, I grabbed a can of black beans and a can of red beans, and headed home with the rest of my groceries.

I made my soup with low expectations.  My improvisations in the cooking world of late have not been worth remembering, let me tell you.  I poured in my cans of beans, added a little extra salt, and hoped for the best.

It was beautiful.  Colorful.  Healthy (the most unhealthy thing in the whole soup was the tablespoon of butter in which I sauteed the veggies).  Cheap.  Hearty.  And you know what?  It was good.  (And the bread was really good, too.)  What a spoiled little miserable girl I am, I thought, to think I need meat to have a well-rounded meal.  Meat schmeat.  Who needs it?

Thank God for beans when gas is in short supply.

celebrating Christ with joy 3.April.2008

As I’ve finished my year of spiritual disciplines, the practice of joy has been the most lasting and fulfilling of all the disciplines.  I chose to read Psalm 119 repeatedly, often aloud, in the weeks before Easter, to remind myself to delight in the word of God.  I want God’s passions to be my passions, so that the actions and thoughts that overflow from my heart are ones that exude the joy and glory of God.

“Celebration is essential to joy,” Jim Wallis writes in The Soul of Politics.  I don’t think a statement like that needs context.  Holidays like Easter should be commemorated with the utmost jubilation.  Many churches today seem to have set aside meaningful traditions, perhaps in an effort to squash out rituals that had become legalistic and cold.  But in so doing, we have lost the art of teaching and enjoying and celebrating.  I want Isaiah — and all my children — to understand why we believe what we believe, why we do the things we do.  To celebrate in tangible ways is to make my life full of Christ, so that he is my family’s meditation “when [we] sit in [our] house and when [we] walk along the road and when [we] lie down and when [we] rise up” (Deuteronomy 11.19, New American Standard Version).  Too many holidays have gone by in my life with only consumer-driven traditions.  I have learned to be thankful for physical gifts but have not learned to be thankful for sanctification, for deliverance, for redemption, for consummation, and for reconciliation.

On Sunday, our church had a Messianic Jewish guest speaker (Steven Ger, from Sojourner Ministries) who explained the spiritual significance of the Seder meal Jews enjoy at Passover.  I came away wanting to celebrate such a meal with my family and friends, retelling the story of rescue and forgiveness and healing every year.  The symbols of wine and bitter herbs, salt water and hyssop are powerful teaching tools.  If an event like the Exodus is worth celebrating with such dedication, how much the more is Christ’s work at Easter?

I was most impacted by Ger’s description of the matzoh — the unleavened bread.  There is a Jewish tradition to put pieces of matzoh into three compartments of a bag.  The piece in the middle compartment is taken out, wrapped in a linen napkin, and hidden away until after the meal.  The other two pieces of matzoh are eaten.  When the meal is completely over, the hidden piece is retrieved, broken, and eaten.  Although Jews disagree amongst each other as to the meaning and beginning of this tradition, the three-compartment bag perfectly symbolizes the Trinity.  The middle piece, Christ, was hidden away in the tomb in linen cloths.  But in his resurrection, he finishes the work with his broken body.  Ger likened the unleavened bread to the unleavened (or sinless) Messiah.  The matzoh, like Christ, is pierced and striped.

The Christian Communion cup took on a whole new significance, too, once I understood more about the Jewish Passover meal.  While four cups of wine are traditionally taken at a Seder meal, Jesus introduced a fifth at the Last Supper with his disciples.  This cup represents the new covenant, the blood poured out in forgiveness of our sin.  Without this cup of reconciliation, Gentiles like me have no part in God’s redemptive plan.  But the cross and the resurrection change all of that.

I’m an amateur at explaining such significant spiritual concepts.  I only know that with a tangible symbol, I start to get it.  I start see what’s worth celebrating.  I remember to celebrate with joy.

love thy manager: on starbucks and recycling 3.April.2008

Our Starbucks store goes through approximately 300 gallons of milk every week, not counting the additional 150 or so half-gallon jugs.  That’s over 16,000 gallon jugs every year.  Company-wide, Starbucks used 93 million gallons of milk in 2007.

It takes 250-450 years for a plastic milk carton to decompose.  And that’s an optimistic perspective.

These are the statistics I wanted to share with my coworkers at our meeting last night.  I wanted to tell them that preserving ecological systems by recycling and caring for our environment means that plants and animals — our food supply! — will be stable and sustained for future generations.  I laid out five steps we could take to move toward that goal.  The first step: ask the property management to provide a recycling bin behind the building.

When I got to the meeting, I told the guy who had asked me to write down my thoughts on recycling that I had my notes.  I thought he had some, too, but… “No, this is your puppy,” he told me.  Fine, then.  I could present what I had; it was compelling on its own.  Before the entire meeting slipped away from me, I asked the manager if I could have a moment to give my schpeal.  “Are you going to volunteer to take the trash to the recycling center?” she asked me, point-blank.  She had asked me this before.  She had told me it was the only option.  I had just dared to hope that the guy who had invited me to make notes might know better than the manager herself, beings he has more tenure and all.  He might know we have more options than the ludicrous idea for a barista to drive ten or more huge bags of trash to the local recycling center every day on volunteer hours.  (Believe me, one part of my head told me I could do that.  Or I could even take a token bag of recyclabes home every night to put in my own bin.)

“I thought we could ask the property management to put a recycling bin out back,” I said to my manager.

“I already asked them,” she said.  “They won’t do it unless our store pays for it, and we don’t have room in the budget for that.”

“How much does it cost?” I asked.  Twice.

“A lot.”

“You know, I would think at a company that tries to be so eco-friendly, corporate would make sure each store has money to pay for a recycling bin, if necessary.”

“Yeah, you would think.  When I first came here, it used to bother me how many cups and everything were thrown away, but then the financial side of things kind of took priority.”

“Okay, I don’t have anything to present then,” I told her, and I pocketed my notes, my compelling statistics, my plan for change.

I’m furious.  We can’t afford to start a recycling program?  We can’t afford not to.  I’m trying to love my manager, to realize that it’s not her fault that she’s not educated enough to care about recycling.  I’m discouraged that from how it looks today, it actually may be impossible for my store to start a recycling program. 

With my little ounce of hope, I want to contact someone in a corporate office and ask them why things are the way are.  I want to ask them if they really expect their earth-conscious employees to personally haul all recyclables away on volunteer hours.

I know there are more important things in life than recycling a milk carton or a paper cup.  But it’s such a simple thing.  I’m not trying to be a hero; I’m just trying to do what’s right.  I guess now that I’ve been slapped in the face, I’ll just have to stay put.  My manager will just have to slap me on the other side because I’m not giving up that easily. 

starbucks: a view from the inside 1.April.2008

I dream of having a coffee shop someday.  It’ll be my little love shop, where folks can’t help but come back, not only for the killer coffee and hot chocolate and baked good(nes)s, but just because they feel more at home there than they’ve ever felt anywhere.  I hadn’t known much about coffee, though, until lately.  Well, I knew what my husband had told me, which he learned from a friend.  I’m not sure where his friend learned it.

We’ve been thinking lately that a little extra income from my working a few evenings a week could help offset our oncoming adoption costs.  And, you know, while I’m at it, I could do some first-hand research on the workings of a coffee house. 

So, I did something I never thought I’d do:  I applied at Starbucks.  But you see, my little shop is an independent shop, and Starbucks… well, it’s very well the antithesis of that.  It’s a behemoth of a company, with tens of thousands of stores worldwide.   And as for the skill of the baristas, while they may have started out with a passion for art in those first little Starbucks shops in Seattle, I hardly feel like an artist as I push the espresso button on our machines.  We get merchandise to sell — seasonal junk that’s available in any old Starbucks store.  You can chose one of six pretty gift cards if you want to give Starbucks drinks to a friend.  We have three cleaners to sanitize the store; nothing else is allowed.  There are rules and standards and drink formulas.

But it’s a great company; it really is.  Benefits are incredible.  The coffee beans really are some of the best in the business.  Every store in the nation shut down a few weeks ago to retrain the baristas on how to steam milk and calibrate the espresso machines so the drinks will come out a little closer to perfect.  It’s a well-oiled machine, even when you’re on the inside.  And Starbucks has a globally sensitive perspective, too, selling Ethos water to build clean-water wells and offering fairly traded coffee so the growers get good payment for their labor.  I guess I expected the best.

Having just sprung onto the environmentalist bandwagon, I was floored to start working at a store that recycled precisely nothing.  Hundreds of empty milk cartons and unused paper and plastic cups travel from our store to the landfill every week.  And the milk itself is another tricky thing:  once steamed milk gets below a certain temperature, it’s down the drain.  The pastries that look so appealling in that shiny glass case don’t actually sell out and get eaten.  The leftovers go… in the trash.

It made me sick the first week.  I loathed the posters of foreign children, so joyful that Starbucks gave them clean water.  I wondered how many more children would be affected by the waste from all the plastic water bottles, since only five or ten cents of the $1.80 it costs to buy the bottle of water actually goes toward the building of wells.  I wondered about the 95% of coffee growers who aren’t represented by the one type of coffee that boasts the “Fair Trade Coffee” stamp (Cafe Estima blend). 

And I kept finding that no one really cared besides me.  When I protested that I didn’t want to practice making drinks that weren’t going to be consumed, people kept telling me: “It’s in the budget.”  But what if it weren’t in the budget?  Think how many more clean water wells you could build!  Think how many more coffee growers you could rescue from a lifetime of poverty?

I started taking leftover pastries to Union Gospel Mission in Dallas, where they’ll be served to homeless men for breakfast.  I started taking the leftover newspapers to my own recycling bin at home.  I’d take milk cartons, but I fear I’d run out of space in about a day.

But I know there’s hope.  One of my superiors said he wanted to present a proposal to start recycling at our store.  He asked me to write down my thoughts on recycling, so he could present it at the next staff meeting.  Whatever he meant by that, I’m all over it.  I plan to research just how much waste our store puts out every year.  Another reason to hope is that we just got more ceramic plates and mugs to offer our customers in place of disposable cups and paper pastry bags.  I can’t help but think that this will dramatically improve customer satisfaction as well as saving trees and landfill space.

And I can’t forget about the love.  I don’t know if anyone at work has read my training notebook, but I wrote that one of my goals for the first three months was to love every customer.  It’s so easy to forget.  I push my register buttons, make my formulaic drinks, and turn my “smile” knob.  “Thanks for the buck; have a nice day.”  But I think learning to love is the real training.  I’ve learned all a certified barista needs to know about coffee and cleaning up the cafe, and I’ve got a pin to prove it.  But have I got what it takes to run my little love shop, to make a lasting impact in this hurting world?  If I can save ten newspapers as I walk out the door, I can just as easily pass out ten words of kindness and healing.

Training isn’t over yet.