my own cup of tea

last week, when talking with a friend as i was crying and walking around the parking lot of a coffee shop at which i was working (oh hey, boy sorrows!), i said, i've spent the last year or so finally growing comfortable with my existence and who i am, instead of wishing it all away, but it still hurts when i'm nobody's cup of tea. meaning, i'm thankful that i'm at a place where i am embracing myself as a person, my spirit, but in doing so, it reaffirms that i'm not a lot of things - light and breezy and instantly enjoyable and warm and all that other stuff, the stuff that seems to be the opposite of a lot of my most dominant characteristics. and so while i learn to enjoy who i am instead of dwelling on who i'm not, it's also bittersweet to realize that my flavor isn't everybody's cup of tea. not everybody's as in i need everyone i come across to like me (there's not enough room on the saucer for all that), but those who i particularly care about, who get to know me and still walk away.

and my friend said, listen, you are a beautiful, exquisite china tea cup, and some day, someone will see that, and then we started laughing and joking about putting together the latest "you're worth waiting for" fad across Christian bookstores nationwide, about each woman being a worthy tea cup and selling a book with a "decorate your own" tea cup. i even suggested a line of saucers for the fellas, so this could really go somewhere.

i've been dwelling on this analogy over the last few days, and recalled something i wrote earlier this spring, that similar to how a word has a definition and a meaning, i have gone through the process of getting a better sense of my definition, and now meaning is finally able to follow, because a definition is just one-dimensional, static. it's certainly nice framework, but there is so much more to something or someone than a string of others words - meaning sends the definition out to live. if life is like a spelling bee, i want to be used in a sentence!

i have hopes for this transition to an entirely new place, in an entirely new season of life. i have faith, though it occasionally wavers. last night, as i said goodbye to someone in the only way i knew how, i was incredibly sad. it didn't make sense how something that could've been, became a confusing nothing. but i prayed as a i cried and drove back home, and this morning, was touched by this passage that reaffirms my hope and faith in something that is bigger than my own cup of tea, and that gathers all kinds of cups of teas together for something more than individual flavors:

 For my thoughts are not your thoughts,

    neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

    so are my ways higher than your ways

    and my thoughts than your thoughts.

“For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven

    and do not return there but water the earth,

making it bring forth and sprout,

    giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;

    it shall not return to me empty,

but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,

    and shall succeed in the thing for which I sent it.

(Isaiah 55: 8-11, ESV)