On Tuesday morning, I decided that I hadn’t consumed enough of my legally addictive stimulant of choice for the day, so I pulled into a Starbucks drive-thru to get some coffee.
I was in line behind a lady that was preoccupied and obviously not paying attention. You know – the kind of person that doesn’t pull up when the person in front of them has already pulled away.
My first reaction was to blow my horn. Not a long beep like “Hey you idiot, move!” More like a small, gentle beep to say, “Hey, get off The Facebook and go please ma’am, I need caffeine.”
But before I could, she pulled up and I ordered.
I was glad, too, because I had remembered that I just wrote a cringe-worthy story about a jerk in McDonalds a few weeks back, where my friend almost did the same thing. He almost blew his horn at the slow person in front of him only to find out that the delay was them paying for his meal.
And wouldn’t you know it – when I pulled up to pay for my coffee, the guy at the window handed me my drink and said, “There’s no charge for this one, the lady in front of you paid,” and smiled.
I drove off dumb and happy, drink-in-hand, feelin’ blessed and cranked up the radio.
But a mile down the road I had a terrible thought – I had broken the chain. A memory came back to me about a story I read of a Starbucks here in Florida where a lady had paid for the person behind her in a drive-thru and 378 people continued to pay it forward for 11 hours. I broke the chain! I thought again as I turned the radio off and set the coffee down in the cup holder and felt sick.
Should I go back into the drive-thru and pay for someone again? the ridiculous thought came into my mind as I tried to figure out how to make this right. I drove on and picked my coffee up and took another sip and for some reason, it didn’t taste as good as it did just a few seconds earlier.
I’ll go back tomorrow, I finally decided.
The next day I was running late. I still went through the Starbucks drive-thru, deciding that paying for someone the next day would be the next best thing. But when I got there, the line for the drive-thru was longer than I had ever seen it in my life. It stretched all the way through the parking lot and into the road. I waited in line for 15 minutes and there were still 10+ cars in front of me. It was like fate was telling me, You’re not going to be a blessing to someone today, sucker. Move on.
So I did.
I drove away from the coffee shop, now even later than I was before, and wondering how I was going to be able to “get even” for the blessing I had received. I had a pretty lousy rest of the day.
The third day, I tried again. I left the house half an hour early to have enough time to “pay the universe back” just in case the line was super long again, or I got stopped by a police officer, or I got a fender bender, or delayed by a train, or a flat tire, or a near miss by a deer that might come close to causing an accident, or a duck or some other stubborn animal that might decide to take a nap in the middle of the road. I was ready for anything that fate might decide to throw my way.
I pulled into the Starbucks and there was no line. Nobody was there. I wasn’t even sure if it was open. Of all of the things I was prepared for, this wasn’t one of them. The person taking orders came on the speaker and asked what I wanted and I took as long as I possibly could to order, waiting for someone to pull up behind me. They must have thought it was the first time I had ever seen a menu with coffee on it. I asked what the difference was between a tall coffee and a venti. Then I asked how big a grande was. They told me about a secret “trenta” size that I had never heard of and I welcomed them to opine as I looked in my rear-view mirror, praying for someone to pull up behind me. I took my sweet time and drove to the window to pay as slowly as possible.
I was worried that I was going to have to come back a fourth day but just as I was handed my change, I saw a car pull up behind me. “I want to pay for them!” I said to the guy at the window who probably thought based on my enthusiasm that I had just won the Florida Powerball lotto.
But they hadn’t just ordered a coffee.
The people behind me had also ordered a couple of sun-dried tomato croissants, oatmeal, and a few spinach wraps and to wash it all down, two cinnamon dolce lattes, a skinny peppermint mocha, and because tis the season, a pumpkin spice latte – enough espresso-based drinks and food for the entire family which I was convinced included two adults and at least six kids.
As I left, I thought of two lessons that I learned about blessings and being a blessing to others.
- When someone blesses you, accept it. Pay it forward if you can, try not to break the chain, but try your best to just accept it and enjoy. That’s why you were blessed – someone wanted to do something nice for you. They didn’t want you to spend all day feeling guilty about it. They didn’t want you to feel like you had to reestablish the universe’s equilibrium of fairness. They wanted you to enjoy a free coffee. On them. No strings attached. Just because.
- Don’t worry about timing when blessing others. I’m the kind of person that thinks about what I should have done after I’m out of a situation. Then I kick myself all day long for not doing the right thing in the moment. But our timing is not God’s timing. That highly-caffeinated and carbed up family of eight behind me may have been who I was supposed to bless after all.