Grounds For Dismissal

Have you ever come to the end of a cup of coffee and realized you were getting coffee grounds in your mouth? You didn’t realize it right off the bat because there weren’t a lot of them and they stay at the bottom. The dark liquid, mixed with a healthy dose of cream and sugar, hides the bitter bits of bean and it isn’t until there’s an unrelenting irritant in your teeth that you realize you’ve gone too far into this cup.

Yeah…me too.

I sat across from someone a while back and listened to her animated conversation. She had a lot to say, and there was so much expression it was easy to be entranced in her words. It wasn’t the first time I had spoken with her and it wasn’t the first time I’d felt the little caution from inside.

“Be careful.”

My conscience was warning me. “If you let her direct this conversation, she will take you where you do not need to go.”

The brooding questions I immediately wanted to ask, the quizzical comments I wanted to make, I knew that the shadow I had seen on certain situations could easily be brought to new light if I simply asked her the right questions, but I also remembered the bitter end.

Just as those dark grounds at the end of my cup were not easily removed from my mouth, the bitter bits of someone’s character are hard to turn loose from my mind. They burrow into my sub-conscience and flavor my thinking toward others.

“Flee from these things!” The simple snippet of 1 Timothy 6:11 found it’s way to the front of my thinking.

“think on these things…” Philippians 4:8 offered the contrast of purity, loveliness and righteousness to me and I found it harder and harder to hear what she was saying.

She continued to talk, the insipid dregs now forming more clearly on the walls of her conversation.

I asked God for an out, my “way of escape” from 1 Cor. 10:13 and it came. I slipped away unchanged, but with a new determination available to me.

These unwelcome, dark and bitter offerings were grounds for dismissal.

This was not a friend I had spoken to…

…not anymore.

This was a bitter cup, clean and polished on the outside, but full of slander that will only spoil truth.

I resolved to love without interest from then on.

I resolved to sit at another table and pour a sweeter drink. Our paths still cross, but I quietly excuse myself from lingering at crossroads.

And I pray. I cannot engage in conversation with her, but I can fully immerse myself as a friend of God into His love that will always reach for her hand. Knowing He loves her deeply, I can mention her softly to Him and trust that someday she and I can walk together again.