It's 3:45pm on a Thursday afternoon, and I'm sitting at Starbucks halfway through a mocha frappucino, my laptop open in front of me and the quiet murmur of a busy coffee shop surrounding me. The air is cool but not unbearable, and I have my gray zip-up hoodie beside me in case I feel cold.
I go to this particular Starbucks almost every day after school, so that I can sit and listen to the soft whisper of white noise, drink my way through a sweet caffeinated drink and work on my homework. It started last semester, the second semester of my junior year. I am a participant in Mock Trial, an extracurricular that meets Monday through Thursday from 6pm to 7:30pm, starting in October and ending in March. I live too far away to go home and then come back to school because of traffic, so I began to spend my afternoons in this Starbucks, which is less than a mile from my school.
At first it was a choice made out of pure practicality—free WiFi, outlets to charge my laptop and phone, coffee to give me a kick of energy after long, arduous school days. I'd come, order my mocha frappucino and a piece of pumpkin bread, heated up, and sit in the back corner, head down, trying to work.
The more time I spent the more comfortable I became—joking around with the baristas, who started calling me by my first name, changing up my regular order occasionally, moving out of the back corner and closer to the door. It became something I looked forward to every day, especially when the pressure of school started wearing on me. For me, school was, and is, a war zone—the enemy being insecurities, overwhelming workloads and a lack of motivation. Starbucks was a place where I could take a breather, step into the eye of the storm for a moment before returning to the hurricane.
As I sit here and reflect on the past year—on the hours upon hours I've spent in this Starbucks—I'm beginning to realize that there is nothing special about this place. It's not some glorious safe space; I don't come here to think, or to learn more about myself, or to delve into and come to terms with the deep mysteries of life. It's just a chain coffee shop that sells delicious sugary drinks and offers free WiFi. Nothing against Starbucks, of course—but that's all it is.
What makes it so special for me is that it was, and is, a constant. Everything changes, endlessly, but not this Starbucks. Even as my relationships, my stress and my workload fluctuates on a daily basis, this Starbucks is the same as it always has been. I could walk into this place perfectly happy, or I could walk into this place feeling utterly despairing, and it would still give me the same quiet, busy atmosphere it always has.
We always hear people talk about change, and fearing change—we hear people talk about how we need to embrace change because it comes no matter what. And it's true—change is a part of life. Not always an easy part, but there nonetheless. What we crave is order from the chaos of life—it's why we build governments, resist improvement within ourselves, dread introducing new aspects into our comfortable schedules. We want order, we want peace, and we want security. It's what I look for in this Starbucks—for me, it's a place of order, peace and security, unchanging despite the turbulent change surrounding it. And everyone needs that; everyone needs something unchanging, something that offers order, peace and security, whether that be a particular place, a particular person or a particular activity. And the more I think about it, the more I reflect on that, I realize that it's because we as humans are seeking something more than what can be found on Earth: We are seeking God.
One day, this Starbucks will be torn down, or replaced with a little restaurant, or remodeled, or destroyed. It will not exist in its current state forever. And in less than a year I will leave for college, and it's likely I may never step foot in here again. It is a place of order for me, but only temporarily, only for a span of maybe a year. Nothing on Earth stays constant forever: The places, people and activities we put our faith and trust in, seeking that order, will inevitably fail us. Places are altered by time; people change, move and die; activities, and our skill or interest in them, fluctuate. The only real constant that we, here, can access is God.
God was here before time was born. Before the universe existed, God was. After the universe stops existing, God will. Even now, as the world changes and changes and changes, God is. Christians so often hear that God calls Himself "I AM," but so many of us—including myself—miss the real substance of this description. God is not one thing, not two things or three things or four things or five things. He is all things. He is. There are not words that can adequately describe Him and His greatness beyond that.
Starbucks is a place, a coffee shop. Our friends are people, moving and aging and changing and dying. School, soccer, Mock Trial are activities, activities I will eventually move past regardless of where I end up in life. And God? God is God. God is. As I change and move and age and die, God will be. He will not ever be any more describable. He will not ever disappoint, or change, or move past me. He is simply God, and He has been, is, and will be here always. The same God that the Israelites called out to thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years ago, isthe same God that I call out to in my nightly prayers before bed. The same God that civilizations another hundred thousand years down the road will reach for is the same God that I reach for in my longing for order. The same God that gives comfort to the widowed woman in some small, forgotten village in Africa is the same God who gives comfort to me in my times of hardship. And that is beautiful beyond words—God really is indescribable.
I'm realizing, then, as I sit here and think about all of this, that you could say I found God in Starbucks. I found God in this chain coffee shop that sells delicious sugary drinks and offers free WiFi. It just goes to show that you can find God anywhere because He is everywhere—eternal, omnipresent and unchanging. He is the being that we seek when we search for answers, when we reach for something better, when we look for order. Because He is. He is, and has been, and will always be. He is God.
