Coffee - part of God's Rescue Plan

 

After Service Coffee at AFC July 2023

Towards the end of last month the news bulletins were full of the dramatic rescue of six children and two adults from a stranded cable car in Pakistan.  The children were on their way to school and often took this one mile journey, 900feet up in the air, thus saving themselves a two hour road trip.  This was the fifth trip of the cable car that morning, before it became perilously dislodged.

Just a week before, whilst on holiday in the Austrian Tirol, we had used cable cars over a dozen times.  They can indeed be thrilling and nerve racking at the same time!

What struck me most about the incident from the Khyber valley in Pakistan is that when the official helicopter rescue ended at dusk, with six people still stranded in the dangling cabin, the locals mounted their own successful operation using zip wires.  One of the passengers, a young boy, seeing the helicopter depart said he thought: well, this has been my last day. Yet to the cheers of the crowd the other side of the mountain, he was safely rescued along the zip wire later that night.  He now, hopefully, has many days stretching out before him.

Those villagers never gave up on the rescue.  They showed a wonderful spirit of hope.  And the result is eight precious lives restored.

The Bible occasionally uses the image of God as Rescuer. Whether from a dark pit or a valley of despair, the idea of that God lifts us up and helps us live another day.

Recently day a friend told me how difficult it was to go through a bereavement just as the Pandemic dawned.  In the days of isolation that followed the usual support and passing words of encouragement that would usually have come from casual encounters just never happened.  And that made it so much tougher.  The ‘rescue’, as it were, didn’t seem to happen.

That’s why I’m always so thrilled to hear the buzz of conversation over coffee in the church hall after morning service.  I sense that such good work is going on at every table as people share news of the week, news of every shade.  And in the sharing, the conversing and the simply ‘being together’, God breaks through and comes among us.  Love touches our lives, and we are made just a little bit more whole.

Just drinking coffee and chatting?  No – it’s much more than that.  It's part of God’s ‘Rescue Plan!