This Building is Alive #2- Seth Daire

As part of celebrating our 5th anniversary, someone who is part of Everyday Joe’s will write something about it each month. Anything from essays to sonnets to interpretive dance. How interpretive dance would translate to this blog, I’m not sure…but it’d be interesting.

Whatever is written, it will come from the life that is in this building. 144 S. Mason seems to be alive and breathing…and it is something you can’t ignore when you walk in. Our second installment comes from Seth Daire, Everyday Joe’s volunteer webmaster & sound tech.

The train is going by. It does that, loudly announcing its presence near our entrance. It reminds us we’re downtown, a block off College Avenue. That’s enough to make us a destination, a place sought out. And they do, college students on bikes, business people in suits, and families with children.

I work from here, volunteer here, and live here. I moved to Oldtown Fort Collins last month, and now walk almost daily to this space that serves coffee. I could stay home, in my quiet flat, sipping a mug of French Press coffee, without distraction. In silence, where I am reminded of the loneliness that pervades our souls, and my own. Rich Mullins once said that loneliness is part of the human condition, even in our best moments.

At times, even this week, the weight of my own pain and disappointment tempted me to pull back, withdraw, lest people see how not together I can be, and think less of me. Yet I am drawn back, and there, in my weakness, I connect, and feel love. Being me. With the irony being that I am best known when I’m not at my best.

There is a quote by Madeleine L’Engle, “If our lives are truly ‘hid with Christ in God,’ the astounding thing is that this hiddenness is revealed in all that we do and say and write.” Sometimes our faith, our life in Christ, is lost in our efforts to force that life into a particular structure or set of words. The mystery of it is that hiddenness is the most visible to those around us when we’re not trying to reveal it.

I, along with many others, choose not only to be here, but to volunteer, whether it be making coffee or running sound for a concert. But it’s not the task that’s significant, but being there, among whosoever walks through our doors, and doing so because love is in our hearts, not because we have to, but because we want to. And when you watch our baristas, that’s what you see. Ministry, not as a program, but as a lifestyle. Ministry that happens when we get out of the way and let people be who God created them to be.

And for those of us who long for community, it’s a place of rest for our weary souls. So we come, not always knowing why. We see the students, the business people, and the children…and slowly…over time, they become family we see every day. The kind of family I can expose my most embarrassing wounds to, and find healing. And why? Because I’m no longer alone in my pain. Because I’m known. And when there’s nothing left to protect, I can simply be.

~ by The Communiqué on February 13, 2008.