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The Gospel According to Mr. Coffee

 






"Every marriage is 10% romance and 90% negotiating how strong the coffee should be.”

Now that I’m home, I make coffee for Erin every morning. This is no small act of service... this is liturgy. Ritual. A daily test of marriage and faith.

Erin likes her coffee a very specific way. When I was working all the time, I thought I nailed it. I’d pour two cups, we’d both drink, nobody died... success.

But now that I’m home, apparently my coffee-making skills have been re-evaluated… and I’m failing the final exam.

Last year, I started with Mr. Coffee... the humble plastic saint of the countertop. He took paper filters and low expectations. I thought he was perfect. Erin did not.

So I graduated to the French press — the “fancy” one influencers swear by. I pressed. I prayed. I presented. Erin took one sip and made the face of someone tasting regret.

Desperate times. I dug out an old-school percolator — the kind that sounds like a tiny volcano. I watched it bubble like an exorcism and thought, This is the one. Spoiler: it was not the one.

At this point, I’d drunk so many “rejected” cups that my blood type was Arabica.

So I did what any man backed into a caffeine corner would do:
I cheated.

For three days, I snuck out to 7-Eleven, filled a cup, brought it home, and poured it into our mugs like I’d just handcrafted it with love and precision.

She took a sip. “Now this is good coffee,” she said.

Reader, she was blissfully unaware she was praising gas-station coffee.

That’s when it hit me... it wasn’t the coffee makers she didn’t like. It was the beans. The fancy, expensive ones I thought screamed “sophistication.” Nope. She wanted simplicity. Familiarity. Coffee that didn’t overcomplicate itself.

So I went back to Mr. Coffee... the old faithful... and used 7-Eleven beans. Problem solved.

And maybe that’s the moral of the story. Sometimes the thing we think is broken — the job, the plan, the person — isn’t broken at all. It’s just brewing something simpler, something truer, something we can actually savor.

Now every morning, when I hand Erin her cup, I whisper a little prayer of gratitude for cheap coffee, second chances, and the quiet reminder that love — like caffeine — doesn’t have to be fancy to wake you up.


“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” 


- Romans 12:12

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