Uncle Fred’s Coffee Soup

While I was growing up, on many Sunday mornings, my family would eat coffee soup. Before you gross out at the idea of something called “Coffee Soup,” let me describe what it is.

Pour coffee into a wide bowl and stir in sugar. Take a slice of your favorite bread and spread peanut butter on it (I recommend you do it generously.) Complete the sandwich with a second slice of bread and spread honey on the OUTSIDE of it. Place it in the bowl, honey-side up, and pour cold milk, cream, or your favorite plant-based beverage on top. Make sure it’s cold milk because this makes that layer of honey a little crispy. Enjoy.

Whether or not I’ve convinced you to try this delightful breakfast, I learned something this week about coffee soup that may be helpful to you.

We have the pleasure of my eighty-one-year-old Mom visiting us this week. She told me a story about my Dad that I’d never heard.

See, my Dad also grew up eating coffee soup. But his Dad had given him strict orders not to put too much peanut butter on his bread. “Make sure you can see the bread,” he instructed. So he was used to that restricted amount of peanut butter.

One Saturday, he spent the day with his cousins at his Uncle Fred’s house and was allowed to spend the night. The next morning, being a Sunday, they had coffee soup.

As Uncle Fred applied liberal amounts of peanut butter to his bread, my Dad’s eyes widened. He had never seen anyone use that much in his life!

Here’s where you enter the story.

Your church context or background in some way rations peanut butter. What just came to mind? Ok. Whether that is license or legalism, expressiveness or restraint, flow or order, formality or informality, go find someone who doesn’t ration peanut butter that way. 

Who is your Uncle Fred? Someone who expands your vision of the possible. Someone who has freedom where your culture has laws. Someone whose sense of adventure with God inspires your own?

It might be a friend, a coach, a conference, an author, a church down the street (or across the globe)… But it’s worth looking for Uncle Fred and experiencing his version of coffee soup. Some people might call it “the MORE of the LORD.”

One last thing.

One of the beautiful things about peanut butter is its perfect metaphor for anointing. Hear me out. Anointing means smearing. Like when something is anointed with the Spirit of God, it’s like it has been smeared with Him. 

If you’ve ever stuck your hands in a tub of peanut butter for a snack (and, I mean, who hasn’t?), you know how it makes its mark in the grooves of your fingerprints, and you have to work hard to rescue every last little bit. Of course, I’m kidding, but peanut butter is oily and hard to remove.

That’s what you want in anointing - for that stuff to stay for a good while.

Uncle Fred’s peanut butter experience is memorable because he’s anointed in that way. (The story I’m telling you happened seventy years ago!) Back to the list of “Uncle Fred’s (a friend, a coach, a conference, an author, a church down the street (or across the globe)…). They are each anointed in a particular way. They have received the LORD’s favor, smeared with peanut butter, if you will.

So get around them and try their coffee soup.

-Dave Helmuth
(purchase my book, "Worship Fertilizer: (the first hundred)" HERE)

Uncle Fred’s Coffee Soup (Nº 358)