Before I can share the Vision with you I have to give you some back story.  I am not a writer, and I never consider what I have to say as being worthy of many listening to it.  Honestly until recently I haven’t been much of a reader either.  Last summer I wrote my first blog post in which I shared the idea behind our company.  Why I wanted to start this company and the feelings behind it.

When my wife and I were first married I thought I had it all figured out.  We graduated from college, got married, and I took over my own franchise restaurant with in a few short months.  I thought I was set, I would run this small restaurant for a few years, prove myself then upgrade, and basically follow the American dream.

Five years later with four small children in tow I found myself selling my franchise back and having to start over with nothing figured out.  My desire was to do something with a ministry focus but I felt I lacked the right talents to serve in this way.  Even in starting this company with a ministry focus, I leaned more into the business side, focusing on growing sales, devising business plans, and fulfilling orders, without taking the proper time to read, grow, and listen to what God had to say.  I’ve been struggling with what Gods will is for my life, which I feel like many people wonder about.  But I was not searching for the answers, I was praying, but not reading.  In the last few months I’ve had an awaking!  God has smacked me in the face with a call to have a deeper intimacy with him.  He’s stripped everything away and left me to cling only to him.  I’ve been a consumer, asking God to bless business ventures, help me take care of my family etc, but I haven’t been setting aside real time with him to read, pray, and most of all LISTEN.  As of late I’ve been obsessed with reading and its been convicting and rough and I feel like I have more questions than answers but I feel his love, and want to share it.

My Vision for Avodah was to start a business with a ministry focus, because I wanted everything to align in one act of worship.  Now I find God changing my vision for the business to being a ministry first, that uses a business to support it. It all belongs to him, so the future of the business is up to him, and his leading.  The most important thing to me now is true intimacy with him first, and whatever follows is secondary. I don’t want to just give him first fruits of the business but the business itself, like my wife said in her talk at the Allume conference, I hold my dreams in open hands offering them to the Lord.

We do not have a brick and mortar store yet, our store front is this website, so I want to start with this blog.  This is not going to be your ordinary business blog, in fact I don’t plan on talking much about coffee.  My vision for the Avodah blog is to explore God’s calling and our response, in our daily living.  My desire is that the business would grow to the point that it could support our family as my full time vocation, so that as a family we can do things like travel on missions trips, and serve people in creative ways.  Would you travel this road with me?  How has God been speaking to you lately?  What action are you going to take today because of something you have read about, or God has revealed to you in prayer recently?

We worship You
Hallelujah, Hallelujah
We worship You for who You are
You are good

You are good all the time
All the time You are good

We sang this in church today.  At the time it stirred my heart and I was praising Jesus, focusing on worshiping him for who he is.  Later this evening I overheard my six year old singing these lyrics and they became stuck in my head.  As I was putting my 3 year old to sleep I found myself singing them to her, and God impressed upon my heart the simple line “You are good all the time, All the time You are Good.”

All the time, not just the good times.  Not just in the day to day normalcy of life.  He is good in the darkest hour.  If we make a mess of our lives, if those we care about most forsake us, if we lose everything…. He …. is…..Good.  This brought to mind Job.  He lost everything, his wealth, his family, even his wife told him to curse God and die.  But it did not weaken his resolve.

I have a friend I met on a trip from work.  We only spent a short week together but he has made a lasting impact in my life.  When asked how he is doing his answer was always better than I deserve.  It threw me off every time, it seemed corny at first, but it was deep.  No matter what my situation, things are better than I deserve, and God is so good.  He created us, then we rejected him.  He responded by redeeming us by sending his son to die for us.  He is Good, and His mercies endureth forever.

to being a part of handing out the 100 millionth shoe box in the Dominican Republic this past December.

This trip was different though, it was more than just working with Operation Christmas Child, God broke her heart specifically for the Dominican Republic.

She couldn’t even bare to wash the clothes she wore or clean the mud off of her shoes when she returned. She couldn’t metaphorically brush the dust from her feet after visiting this land.  So when we sat in our church on Christmas Eve and they announced that we would be sending a team to the Dominican Republic, to work in the orphanage our church specifically supports long term, she immediately knew she had to go.  God has provided everything she needed for this trip, and this morning at three am she left to serve there again.  I pray God would use the people he sent on this team to be his hands and feet.  I am excited about the way he is calling her revealing how she can use her talents and passions for him very recently.

What indeed has coffee to do with theology? If you’ll excuse the paraphrase, this quote from the early Christian thinker and theologian Tertullian is a great starting point on understanding avodah and life.

The Meaning of Avodah

P.S. This is the technical stuff that gets us to the application. Hang on tight!

The Hebrew term avodah is an important concept in both the Old Testament and understanding the biblical concepts of “work” and “service”. Hebrew words are constructed from “root” letters, that can be built upon to give meaning to the term in different contexts, like a foundation to a house. The root of avodah is ʿḇḏ, which can be used as a noun—”work” or “service,” even “servant” or “slave”—or as a verb—”to work,” “to serve.” Each of these definitions share the same root consonants, but their meaning (and vowels used!) depends on the context of the word. Work. Service. Serving. Working. That’s Avodah.

Life and Work Coram Deo

We’re learning all kinds of dead languages that no one else cares about anymore today, but my hope is that in these dead languages you find life, and what it means to truly live.

Coram Deo is a Latin phrase that means “in the presence of God.” In our culture, those of us who are Jesus-followers can often times fall into the trap of dividing the world into “secular” and “sacred” categories. Going to church is “sacred.” Going to work is “secular.” Listening to popular music is “secular.” Listening to contemporary Christian music that ripped-off the popular music is “sacred.” But the Bible never really gives us these categories (the concept of “godly” verses “worldly” is a much different concept).

This division is called “dualism,” and it separates the materialness (read: bad) from the spiritualness (read: good) of the universe.¹

What Coram Deo means, and what I believe the Bible teaches, is that all of our life is lived “before God.” We are not to divide areas of our life in this way, but rather as early 20th Century theologian Abraham Kuyper said,

…there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: Mine!

Avodah, Life Coram Deo, and Worship

So, if we ever want to get a Jesus-glorifying sense of our lives, we must understand the concepts of Avodah (work and service), and Coram Deo (all of life in the presence of God). It’s at the intersection of these concepts that “work” becomes “worship.” After all, Paul teaches us that “whatever you do, do it for the glory of God.”

We’ll explore the link between work, service, and worship in my next post. In it, we’ll look at the relationship between Adam’s call to Avodah in the Garden of Eden and the Priest’s role of Avodah in the Jewish Tabernacle/Temple, and compare this biblical view with the common (incorrect) view of the “Protestant work ethic.”

Footnotes

For the really nerdy.

1. If you’re interested in pursuing this a little further, you can read more about this on my series on the importance of our physical bodies at my own blog. You can read the first five parts that have been posted: Part I: How We View the Human Body, Part II: Creation—It Was Good, Part III: Creation—Human Beings as Engendered Dirt, Part IV: Fall—Broken Bodies in a Broken World, Part V: Redemption—God is For the Body, and Part IV: Restoration-How it was Meant to Be.

Avodah and Freeset are partnering together to help free women from human trafficking. Please meet Ajanta, who is a first “freedom generation” Freeset girl. Here is her story:

Ajanta grew up in a red light area – her mother was in the sex trade. This meant that as Ajanta reached puberty she was very vulnerable to the men prowling the area. She managed to stay at school longer than many girls in her situation but what she would do when she finished school was by no means certain. As the daughter of a sex worker her prospects were somewhat limited. “I heard about Freeset from my neighbours” she recalls, “So I talked to my Mom about contacting Freeset for a job”.

“I was very excited to be offered a job at Freeset” she says, but being young and fresh out of school Ajanta had no sewing experience and she had never previously had a job. “I was scared dealing with new people in a work environment” she remembers, “but slowly I became attached to Freeset and developed the feeling of being a part of the Freeset family. When I was first asked to sit at a machine I had no confidence at all – I was afraid of even placing my feet on the pedals!”

However, she enjoyed the training a lot and today – 6 years later – she is an excellent seamstress, full of confidence. So much so, that Ajanta was transferred from sewing bags to the Tees unit which requires a much higher level of skill.

Instead of a life tainted by the sex trade, Ajanta’s time at Freeset helped her to improve her prospects. She has been able to marry into a respectable family. She knows just how necessary Freeset is in this community; “All the women still in trade need to be free.”

Your purchase of Avodah coffee helps free women from human trafficking. Thank you for being part of the freedom story.