Enjoy your Coffee

A friend sent me the following:

 

A group of alumni, highly established in their careers, got together to visit their old university professor. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life.   Offering his guests coffee, the professor went to the kitchen and returned with a large pot of coffee and an assortment of cups - porcelain, plastic, glass, crystal, some plain looking, some expensive, some exquisite - telling them to help themselves to the coffee. All the students had a cup of coffee in hand, the professor said: "If you noticed, all the nice looking expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is but normal for you to want only the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. Be assured that the cup itself, adds no quality to the coffee in most cases, just more expensive and in some cases even hides what we drink. What all of you really wanted was coffee, not the cup, but you consciously went for the best cups... and then began eyeing each other's cups. Now consider this: Life is the coffee, and the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold and contain Life, and the type of cup we have does not define, nor change the quality of Life we live. Sometimes, by concentrating only on the cup, we fail to enjoy the coffee God has provided us. God brews the coffee, not the cups... Enjoy your coffee.

 

Sometimes I think that Americans get caught up in the trap of wanting the very best while losing sight of the goal of enjoying their lives to the fullest possible measure. I often remark that I work to live--not live to work. I think that many of the people around me look at their lives through the latter's perspective. While I do not disagree with wanting the very best, I do agree with the conclusion of the professor that jobs, money and position in society are just tools we use in creating our lives. They can be our servants, or they can be our masters. It's up to us on who rules who.

 

Dare I say, the same can be said of our system of government, too. The founders wrestled and deliberated for many weeks trying to create a government that would only do those things that each individual state could not do by itself. Now, more than two hundred years later, we can see that the people elected into positions of power and authority are never content with the plain old government we've provided to them. They instead forever endeavor to reshape our system of government into something that it was never meant to be.

 

Unfortunately, the process of remaking our system of government requires more and more of the people's freedoms, liberties, and property to make it hold it's new shape. In an effort not to be outdone, each subsequent elected official has to recreate the government as if to say, "Look what I made of it. And it only cost you just a little more of your lives without government." One day we will all learn that government is merely a tool and should only be used as such. It should never be used to rule people--but to protect and defend the life, liberty and happiness of those who have instituted it.