I woke up already irritated. I was irritated at myself because my physical health keeps getting in the way of what I know I am being led to do here at Twin Tree and in everyday life. Irritated that my sleep is disjointed and rest still eludes me even when I do sleep. Irritated at my dogs for being so chipper in the mornings. Irritated at my husband for the same reason.
I have been struggling in general with motivation and productivity, even if not with my faith or my relationship with God. That has been the subject of many conversations between us lately, as I have tried to get through the days while still keeping my character and my obedience to Him in the forefront. He has been asking me to do many things I would really rather not do. I have been doing them, and not complaining. But I have been questioning those things.
I have been questioning Him, asking Him, “Lord, I am doing these things, but please show me why You are asking me to hold this standard, to live this reality,” and any number of other *why*s. This morning God said, in so many words, “Hold my coffee. I am going to show you. And I want you to pass it along.”
I read the verse of the day first thing, as I always do after I let the dogs out and get my coffee on the way back to my room.
The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer. — Psalm 18:2
I pondered the Scripture, was led to read the full passage in context, and then decided to sit with it and see what God was going to brew in my heart with it throughout the day. That did not take long. And that pun is no coincidence.
I started my workday around 6:15 a.m. I opened YouTube to check comments on my channel, as one does when you are building a community. The first Short that showed itself when I opened the app was the point at which God went immediately to work.
What played before me was a video about coffee, inflation, and keeping the faith. It was an older lady, and at first I felt a bit nostalgic for my grandma and a lot of empathy for the woman in the video. Then, she started into having faith, and something twinged in my gut. God was saying, “pay attention. Every detail.” So, I did. I watched and I listened.
As I listened to the words coming out of her mouth, I took in the visual truth. She was decked out in gaudy jewelry, all fixed up and sitting on the screened porch of her very obviously much-much home. There were designer things surrounding her, on the shelves and on the walls and even clothing her body. She was obviously not lacking in money, obviously a woman of some status in her world. As she continued to speak about how we just have to know that God wants us to be spoiled and have the things that please us, how we just have to continue to have faith that He will provide our needs, a fire began to blaze inside me.
She finished her story about how she had gone out with her daughter and a friend for coffee at a “not even fancy coffee shop” (as she turned up her nose) and how the ticket had been just over $35. This is where faith jumped to her consciousness, it seems. She saw that $35 price tag and jumped to, “God, I know you want me to have my needs met and so I am having faith in you to cover these inflation costs! $35!! For coffee that was 10 cents a cup when I was a child!” The fire raged on in me.
I moved to the comments as the video ended. I watched people defend paying thirty-five dollars for three coffees like it was a civic duty. I read comments that said things like, “yeah, it’s tough out here, but I have to have my Starbucks!!” “Can’t get through the day without my caffeine!” “It’s high but it is what it is, God definitely provides!”
What?
Even with inflation, that is not the cost of beans and water. That is the cost of a status symbol masked as a morning routine. Decades ago, Starbucks pioneered a brilliant corporate trick: they took a basic commodity, wrapped it in pseudo-European sizes, and convinced an entire generation that carrying a cardboard cup with their logo was a marker of sophistication.
They didn’t just sell caffeine; they sold an identity. And because they proved people would willingly pay a massive premium to perform this ritual in public, the entire tide rose. The local, hole-in-the-wall coffee shops had to follow suit just to survive the competition, normalizing eight-dollar lattes across the board. Starbucks rewrote the economy of a morning habit, and we handed them the pen.
Yet, day after day, plenty of people still line up, wrapped around drive-thrus that spill out into active traffic. It’s a fascinating, exhausting spectacle. They aren’t trapped there because they have no other options. They are there because the status has become indistinguishable from the habit itself. To brew a pot at home feels, to the modern mind, like a concession or a downgrade. They would genuinely rather pay the corporate tax and lose fifteen minutes idling in a line than do the small, unglamorous work of pressing a button on their own kitchen counter.
The green mermaid didn’t just hook them on sugar and caffeine! She hooked them on the feeling of being the kind of capable, busy person who buys their morning from a window. That is the part that gets me. That is what truly grinds my gears, and where the fire in my gut turns into a profound grief.
People will talk about trusting God to provide, and then they will turn around and hand a corporation a day’s full grocery budget for three drinks they could have brewed in their own kitchen, and even turned into a fancy drink with syrups and milk for an eighth of the cost. What am I saying here? It is NOT just a judgmental rant. It is a righteous truth:
Christian Americans have twisted the definition of faith until it fits American consumerism. But “faith” is not a substitute for spiritual, or even human, sense.
The line people love to quote, “the Lord helps those who help themselves,” is exactly right here. It means God expects us to use the minds and the stewardship He gave us, not to act utterly foolishly because we are choosing to live of the world, and then cry out, “God, meet this need!” simultaneous with “Where is God?” when the bill comes due. What Scripture actually says is much plainer, and a whole lot harder to swallow:
Be faithful even with little. Do not love the show.
Proverbs tells us that the wise store up choice food and olive oil, but fools gulp theirs down. We are gulping ours down at three miles per hour in a drive-thru lane, expecting Heaven to finance our refusal to change. So, let’s look at the actual math on the coffee, then, because God gave us minds to count the cost:
A tub of decent coffee is high due to inflation, but not that outrageous when you’re already spending ten dollars a cup at a coffee shop. The Maxwell House 38-ounce canister sitting on a Walmart shelf sells for just under nineteen dollars before tax (as of the writing of this post). If you follow the instructions on the back of the can, you are looking at roughly one tablespoon per six-ounce cup. Even if you are not conservative with your measurements, say you only get twenty pots out of it, twelve cups to a pot, that is 240 cups of coffee.
Twenty dollars divided by 240 is about eight cents a cup. Let’s round it up to a dime just to be generous to the argument.
A dime.
Not four dollars. Not six. Certainly not ten dollars.
A dime.
Yes, I know the cafe is selling labor. They are paying rent, buying expensive espresso machines, stocking oat milk, and providing a climate-controlled place to sit and be seen. I know that. I am not pretending a barista works for free. I am saying the liquid in that paper cup is not what costs thirty-five dollars for three. The markup isn’t the coffee. The markup is the story they sold you. The story is the narrative that this ritual is what capable, modern, worthwhile people do with their mornings.
But you do not have to buy the story. You can still enjoy a good cup of coffee. You can still meet a friend. You can still tip a worker who is on their feet all day. Common sense is not cruelty. The common sense element here is simply refusing to confuse a treat with a lifestyle, and a lifestyle with an identity.
I keep thinking about how much of modern life runs on that very confusion. We have been trained to outsource the ordinary and then call the bill “self-care.” We are trained to treat convenience as a virtue and thrift as a deprivation. Then, we act shocked when the receipt looks insane. It is not insane. It is the system working exactly as it was designed to.
If you want the cafe, go. If it truly blesses you, and you can afford it without resentment or stretching your budget, fine. But do not stand there and tell me there is no other way. Do not look at a high price tag on a luxury and act like it’s an unavoidable casualty of a broken economy. There is another way. It lives in a plastic tub, a cheap drip pot, and ten minutes you already have in your morning.
The world is loud right now with people who want to be rescued from the consequences of their own habits. They want God to perform a financial miracle to cover the costs of a lifestyle they refuse to surrender. They are sitting in the middle of a self-made flood, complaining to God about the rising water, and calling their inaction “prayer and faith.”
But look at the true story behind the Scripture. Look at Psalm 18:2, where David declares, “The Lord is my rock, my fortress, and my deliverer.” We love to slap that verse onto pretty mountain backgrounds, but we forget the dirt, the sweat, and the blood that birthed it. David didn’t sing that song from a place of luxury. He sang it after surviving the wilderness, running from Saul, and stepping onto actual battlefields. David called on God, but then David moved. He didn’t sit in the flood demanding a divine bailout for foolish choices; he moved out in active faith with a righteous heart and a ready sling.
The Lord helps those who help themselves – meaning He expects us to operate with the wisdom, common sense, and stewardship He already provided. God will absolutely go to war for His children, but not when we are clinging to the status quo garbage of this world, overcharging our lives for a bit of public prestige, and refusing to get out of our own way. I am tired of watching us mistake consumer preference for divine provision, and I’m tired of pretending that willful ignorance is wisdom.
Make the coffee. Enjoy it. Leave the image and status quo on the counter, in the world, where it belongs.
As I close this post, I am hearing a lyric from the song “Trust in God” from Elevation over and over in my spirit. “I sought the Lord, and He heard, and He answered.” Along with it, the scripture, “Ask, and it shall be given unto you.” But you have to be able to get out of your own way and see what is given; you have to be willing to then look at and accept the answer.
I started my morning asking God why, and He showed me.
He showed me that when the world gets loud, expensive, and superficial, the standard of the Kingdom doesn’t budge. True security isn’t found in a cardboard sleeve with a corporate logo; it’s anchored in the Rock. The standard looks like discipline. It looks like stewardship. It looks like finding contentment in a ten-cent cup of coffee because your identity is hidden in the Fortress, not purchased at a drive-thru window.
A question for you to sit with today, if you want one:
Where else have you been paying for a symbol or an image, and in what ways – when what you actually needed was a pot of something simple, righteous, and real?
And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
Our Lord, come.