Caffeine as My Daily Savior

Responding to a Washington, DC.-area friend, who wanted to know what I was doing up so early on the West Coast, I took several additional gulps from my vente Pike, half-decaf, room for milk, and sent him my prayer.
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I grew up as a PK2 -- a preacher's kid, times 2. Both my parents were Congregational ministers, more interested in social justice issues than doctrinaire theology. As a college-affiliated pastor, my father was active in the Freedom Rider movement in the '60s and made several trips to the South with his students, enduring local abuse when he participated in a number of marches. He attended the 1963 March on Washington and heard Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. In addition to her divinity school degree, my mother was also a teacher, working in an inner city high school in the Northeast.

As non-doctrinaire as they were, my parents still expected my sister and me to attend Sunday school every week until we went off to college. So, the words of the Lord's Prayer come back to me as readily as the words in the Pledge of Allegiance.

I mention this background to establish my religious upbringing bona fides, hopefully softening the reaction of various friends and family members when I invoke my new morning prayer, divinely inspired as I waited earlier this week for an early morning flight out of Southern California for Las Vegas, where a kind of religious gathering was going on -- CES, the Consumer Electronics Show.

Responding to a Washington, DC.-area friend, who wanted to know what I was doing up so early on the West Coast, I took several additional gulps from my vente Pike, half-decaf, room for milk, and sent him my prayer. It may not make sense to my Jewish, Buddhist and Muslim friends, but any seriously caffeine-addicted Christian will understand:

Our Starbucks, who art in airports, hallowed by thy bean

Thy caffeine come, thy get me some, on earth as it is in heaven (I hope)

Give us this day our daily fix, and forgive us our lost Gold Passes, as we forgive those who push past us

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us that latte (now!)

For thine is the Tall, the Grande and the Vente, forever and ever

Amen

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