My life has been surprisingly changed by what I expected to be a minor adjustment.
I've up drinking coffee (and all other caffeinated beverages, also).
My relationship with coffee began when I was sixteen years old. I was an extremely busy teenager, made good grades, played in the youth group praise band, and worked over 30 hours per week at the local hardware store. Saturday mornings started way too early. I would pour a cup of heavily sugared coffee and sip it as I made my way through the aisles helping customers, cycling through the store and back to the coffee pot all day long.
A dozen years of theological education, late night paper writing, burning the candle at both ends while working and serving churches only solidified my addiction.
We Methodists treat coffee as the third sacrament. Coffee is everywhere. I've loved my coffee habit. I have a whole collection of coffee makers--french press, Keurig, Ninja, Italian stovetop expresso maker. I love the taste, the warmth, the buzz.
But I was starting to be concerned. My sleep has been off for a long time. I knew I was drinking way too much coffee, drinking cup after cup all day long and into the afternoon. I was tired a lot and knew I was treating an addiction cycle less and less successfully.
So I decided to give it up for Lent and see how it went. I'd done it before about a decade ago, painfully. That time, I had terrible headaches. I also had a surreal experience of feeling as if my head was disconnecting from my body while I was sitting in a meeting. But I got through all that and felt great for a while--until Holy Week hit and I fell off the wagon.
This time was easier. Easter morning came, and I had a decision to make--to joe or not to joe. I decided to stay off of it.
Coffee's great and everyone I know drinks it, so please don't get tangled up about what I'm going to say next about what I am discovering. Please drink your Joe. I'm just telling you what I'm learning.
First of all, I feel better. I sleep better. I wake up more easily in the morning. I've had terrible nighttime heartburn for years, but no more. All of that is good.
I'm also discovering that I have habituated the moderation of my mood and energy with a substance for my entire adult life. It's been a huge adjustment now that it's gone. Sometimes, my energy dips and I feel like a nap. I have a knee jerk reaction to get a warm drink. I tried drinking green tea for a while, but it doesn't do anything. What am I supposed to do? Just be tired? Maybe so. Maybe when you're tired you're supposed to be tired and not mask it with a drug! It's dawned on me that it has never been a healthy thing to regulate my energy this way, that all along maybe I should sleep when I'm tired, get some exercise, or adjust what I do so that my activity energized me.
I'm also noticing that my approach to life is changing a bit. Caffeine doesn't just wake you up. It makes you nervous. It makes you edgy, especially when you've had too much. It makes you impatient. I'm getting used to feeling less driven, less busy-feeling. This is a good thing, especially for a spiritual leader. But I have to admit it feels a little like boredom. Who would have thought that I would need to relearn how to be motivated without coffee?
So my caffeine-free experiment is producing some more substantive results.
I have no clue whether this is true or not, but many years ago I heard that evangelical Christians in Germany don't have the kind of taboo about alcohol that American Christian conservatives have. Beer is perfectly OK for them. But they don't allow caffeine. Mormons don't allow caffeine either. Seventh-day Adventists avoid it, too.
I'm not into any kind of prohibitions. I grew up around prohibitions and I found them suffocating. The Apostle Paul prohibits prohibitions, thank God. But I am thinking some about how any kind of substance (caffeine, refined sugar, alcohol, nicotine, etc.) that we use to alter our mood, perception, personality, energy puts a hook in us and masks our need to find behavioral remedies for our weaknesses and challenges. That's not healthy, physically or spiritually. It was for freedom that Christ has set us free.
