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There are two kinds of Saturday morning coffee. By which statement I signal a false dialectic that I cannot bear to continue without exposing it before I have gone too much further. Nevertheless, there are two kinds of Saturday morning coffee. There is the hustle and bustle of Saturdays that are full and have no room for the tiny, brief repose we give to a cup of coffee and a moment with God. Then, there are the Saturdays that seem full of time, slow and syrupy. They taste like honey. I think Guerrilla coffee is the former and Red Horse Cafe is the latter. I need both in my life, which I see without being really sure why. So I will attempt to outline the two here.

Guerrilla Coffee is an experience, to say the least. It is the kind of place you go in order to be seen wearing an almost hipster t-shirt and an almost hipster fedora -with the short brim and a little crinkled.  Guerrilla’s self image is so brutally on show that it competes with its primary function as a coffee shop. In fact, I should wonder that its image were not its primary function, were it not for its very good coffee. (Although, their coffee has room for improvement for those who enjoy a lighter roast.) Guerrilla coffee is the loud, probably indie music listening spot, but tinged with a spark of everyday pop hidden in the background.

To sit down at Guerrilla is to start off on a race. It is to sprint with all the energy you have and to revel in the beauty of exhaustion afterwards. You don’t go there to fill up your time, you go there because your time is already full, and the only escape from that fullness is to run another race with yourself and your coffee.

But Guerrilla’s image function simultaneously leaves you back in the world you were escaping. Thus Guerrilla challenges you to find your rest in and through the midst of the hustle and bustle of your day. Guerrilla coffee is like the coffee shop equivalent of Hebrews‘ hall of fame. It is also Hebrews‘ calling to find our rest in Christ and to stop wearying ourselves on the labor of making ourselves righteous.  But it is that calling realized in the everyday life of the Christian. It is the moment when we run the race in faith in God and not in faith in ourselves or our works. We stop laboring, completely, and yet still run the race. It is the paradox of the collapse of work into rest, the paradox that we are at rest, and yet still see fruit, the paradox which collapses because it is Christ who lives in us. Well, something like that. But I’m not really talking about a coffee shop anymore.

Red Horse, by contrast, is Jazz. It is slow meditation, time that fills up the moment and spills into the beyond time. It is time when he have time to waste time. It clears a spot for wasting time, and invites us to waste it with a cup of coffee and a good book. It is slowly turning the pages of a novel that we have read a hundred times before (Actually I don’t think I’ve ever done that!). Red Horse is a place where a person can go and feel that the world is not impinging. Its sense of self image is retrained, though still fully present. It is the image of art galleries turned into music venues for slow meditative music. For the slow exposure of our hurt and grief, and at the same time of the fullness of a joy we somehow only imagine, and in britghter moments hope for. But it is not gloomy, it is cathartic.

I think Red Horse is more like that moment when I get the chance to close my door and pray. It is that oneness with God where nothing else gets in the way, where I can stay and relax in the presence of God and know that all my cares and burdens have been released. It is the time when I will finally stand in awe of God. It is the place where life seems to take on a meaning as an inverse of my present experience, rather than as a refraction into my present experience.

But now I must undo the dichotomy. You see, I too often live in this world where I am breaking apart looking for rest in the middle of work, and yet never seeking rest outside it. Or if I seek rest outside it, I’m having a hard time seeking rest inside it. I think God wants to be near us in both places. To give us rest in both places. The distinction may be helpful. And yet I think we need not always see our lives as so completely fractured, as so lacking wholeness that we must always choose between the two.

I believe that we should not get too caught up in the quest to see what side of the dialectic we are one. And I doubt that we need to solve whether one side is better than the other. Rather, I think we should keep a oneness of focus on Christ. There the image of our lives can disappear so that we can follow Christ, whether he beckons us to pray in the garden, or to labor with him. But when we stop working to see ourselves, and start looking to Christ, the kind of ways we experience ourselves shift a bit. We should experience ourselves only through Christ, as Bonhoeffer tried to explain. Christ is our only access. But we are not seeking to experience ourselves, we are in some sense blind to ourselves, we have eyes only for God. How we make our rest, when we need it, is a gift from God. It is not something that we simply get for ourselves. So however it happens we should accept it as a gift.