Today, I have a story for you.
It was June of 2013. I was going through my training at MugWalls, a local coffee shop that I just started working at, and we were learning how to clean everything. When the manager went to show both of us trainees the back storage room, however, we were greeted with a foul smell from two large containers that, as I was informed, could keep a beverage hot for 18 hours and served 100 people each. Amazing! How useful these things were, especially when catering to a huge group. They could do something entirely necessary by design, bringing a wonderful warm drink to many people at a time. However, there was the unfortunate matter of the terrible smell.
As it turned out, these fantastic containers had been used to take hot chocolate to an event in the neighboring town known as “First Friday,” a sort of art festival that takes place in the streets, back in April. But when the event had ended and it was time to bring them back to the store, whomever was in charge neglected to empty and clean them, instead throwing them into the storage room to hold the hot chocolate. Time went on, Texas weather did exactly what you would expect, and it got hot. Like, really hot. Hot chocolate, as you know, has milk in it, which does not take well to being left in a warm room for two months, leaving us to find that awful smell during our training.
This isn’t a story that’s just about cleaning at a coffee shop, though. When I was a kid, I had a responsibility, a task. I was supposed to spread love to the world around me, showing everyone who was broken that they had been given the wonderful gift of life and salvation, but instead I kept it locked away, viewing it as my secret. I was full of hot chocolate, but I allowed myself to reside in a warm storage room and sour instead. But do you know what we did after we found those containers? We took them into the kitchen and scrubbed them for the better part of two hours, painstakingly getting every bit of mold and grime out of them. They still had a bit of a smell, but nothing nearly as bad as before, so we let them air out. In much the same way, I spent the latter part of high school trying to break down my cynicism, scraping out the love that had turned to hate over time. For a while, the cynicism and lonesomeness stayed as a ghost, whispering its old message even when I tried to send it away, but as time went on the ghost grew quieter and quieter until I could hardly hear it anymore.
We all have the great potential to love one another and do such fantastic things. Don’t let that love sit inside and spoil, because it’s the best thing a person can offer.
- Zac L.
No comments:
Post a Comment