Curdled Milk

Have you ever seen what happens to milk that gets steamed when it’s on the “edge” of freshness?  If you aren't a barista, you probably haven’t.  Quite frankly, even if you are a barista, I hope you don’t.  It’s ugly.  Really ugly.  Almost as ugly as a fourteen year old girl hearing an adult at church telling their friend that her family doesn't belong at that church and they wish the family would just leave. 

That isn't the only ugly thing which has ever been heard from a person attending church.  I realize that.  This one was just personal to me, and it “curdled my milk”, so to speak.  Hot chocolate, or a latte, made with milk which curdles in the steaming process ends up with ugly lumps of a strange, sickly grey shade floating on the surface.  The ugly words my daughter overheard one morning churned up similar sickly emotions to the surface of my church attendance for several weeks.  My first choice in dealing with those emotions is one I’m not proud of; I told several people I trusted to sympathize, and to be outraged on our behalf regardless of how it might affect their “milk”.  Some of us have been lucky enough to have literal curdled milk “shared”, too, right?  And we always wonder why that person needed to have us see and smell that mess.  And just to be completely clear, adding steam heat only makes the smell and sight worse…

The fact of the matter is, that woman is right.  God has been preparing us to not belong in Muncie, Indiana for quite some time.  We can’t belong in Indiana and be happy in the south of France at the same time.  And when we go there, we won’t truly belong, either.  We have personal beliefs which conflict with both Postmodernism and Islam, the two major worldviews held by citizens of Toulouse.  We all expect that the heat of living as believers in a fallen world will only be turned up to steaming in that place.  I can only pray that it won’t curdle the milk of human kindness there because I’ve lived with it here.  So help me, God.