The Panera Paradox.

You know what the one thing I love to do more than almost anything else in the world is? Go to Panera at 7AM, eat bagels and pastries, and just talk with someone. Yes, that's right; 7AM. This is usually how I spend my Friday mornings with Charis, but since she is in Texas right now loving on some little ones for Jesus, I took my cousin on a Saturday morning and embarked on this adventure. Originally, our plan was to sit down, have our quiet times, and then discuss them after I put together this adorable encouragement note idea for my team mates. Yeah. . . it was a nice idea in theory, but once I had failed at avoiding my least favorite employee and awkwardly ordered a chocolate chip muffie* and Carrie Lee practically hid behind a wall to avoid looking like a creep while waiting on her hot chocolate. How could we NOT discuss such things? And then who can really pray and eat and read their Bible and journal all at the same time? Not me. I find it much easier to talk with my mouth full than smear powdered sugar and muffie crumbs on my Bible. So. . . we basically ended up talking the whole time and verbally processing everything we've been through in the past month, such as my trip to Romania, her trip to Canada, and the after effects of both. Sure, we didn't end up having the quiet time we planned before talking, but we still ended up discussing the same things we would have discussed anyway and we verbally processed and advised over a lot of things that needed to be covered. We talked about everything from our fantastic team mates to writing styles to our upcoming semesters as a college student and a foreign exchange student in Ireland to the ways we've seen God working through the hard things, and those were the things we needed to discuss most.
I do my best verbal processing at 7AM in Panera over pastries, bagels, and coffee. Even if I'm occasionally distracted by the cute group of old ladies meeting for breakfast or the long haired hippie who just arrived on his bike and lose my train of thought over this, I find I've had some of my best conversations over serious matters in that same corner booth by the window where the same employee always comes and closes the curtains at the same time, reaching over us and saying, "Sorry ladies," with a slight lisp. There is something so incredibly comfortable about discussing your struggles and frustrations as people shuffle past you with their food and go about their day, unaware that you've been sitting there for hours watching both the breakfast and lunch crowd come through and you long ago finished off your food but are still sitting. I usually know it's time to leave when the people around me are finished with lunch and my feet are on pins and needles from sitting so long, but it's totally worth it.
I know it's weird to go that early for no reason, but I find something really comforting in those 7AM "bagel dates" (as Charis and I call them). They are something I'll really miss once I'm at school this fall, so I might have to institute them as a Saturday morning thing with a friend at school and start a new tradition. One thing I really miss about Romania is having the time to verbally process and just discuss things, so now that I'm home I find I really crave that intimacy and vunerability in my life.
So, the moral of the story? If you ever go to Panera with me early in the morning and I order a cutesy named pastry, you're going to get your ear talked off and some sleepy feet, but you'll make my day so much brighter.

*(ASIDE: Muffies are the biggest paradox known to mankind. Well, at least for me they are. They combine the best and worst of the world: Muffin tops and cutsie names. The day I discovered that someone else in the world shared my theory of "the top of the muffin is the only part worth eating", I was exhilirated. I saw those glorious, golden muffin tops sitting on the platter in Panera, hit just so perfectly by the light so that it looked like God himself was shining a spotlight on them for me, and I immediately felt the love connection. Then, I saw the name assigned to these heavenly creations: muffie. MUFFIE?! Why would you give something as glorious as a muffin top a name that sounds like it was created for a 4th grader to nickname their friend or an animated children's show character. WHY?! Ordering such a thing made my stomach churn and skin crawl, but I knew that if I could make that word cross my lips, I would be handed the best thing I had ever eaten in my life. One painful, sugary word would equip me with golden, chocolate chippy perfection. . . This, my friends, is the definition of a paradox.)