“There is nothing sweeter than a cup of bitter coffee”. This was said by Rian Aditia. I didn’t understand what he meant then. “How could bitter coffee be sweet?”. I’m not too fond of bitter coffee. I remember my parents bringing home 2 cups of coffee from a particular restaurant one day. I had already tasted coffee once before, and it was sweet and creamy. It was topped with a small amount of milk with a hint of chocolate. It felt like my body had been plugged with a charger. So, when I saw 2 cups of coffee right before me, I knew my parents would never know. I took a sip and immediately spat it back out. I wouldn’t say I liked it. I thought coffee was supposed to be light and sweet. But the coffee was dark and bitter. Looking back, I guess that’s how we can portray the times we are living in now.

Whenever I pray with my life group, mentioning the pandemic, I always use the term, dark times. I believed that these times were cruel and gloomy. “Nothing good can ever come out of this,” I thought. Recently, my youth campus had posted announcements, broadcasting the start of purple book classes. Looking back, I was so far from God. I had such a deep relationship with him before the start of my first years of high school. But I suppose I had slowly drifted away from him over a long period of time. I desperately clung on to anything that could help me get back the relationship with him that I had lost. I signed up for some purple book events. I recall thinking it was just going to be a 30-minute lecture that a particular pastor would be preaching through our zoom chats. But boy was I wrong.

We started orientation, and that’s when I realized this is was an actual class. As I was quarantined at home, I was supposed to wake up at 8 Am every Friday on the weekend. On top of that, we had tons of homework piled onto us like a stack of books, waiting to crush us. Somewhere along the 4th lesson, I had felt dead. This class just added more bitterness to this already bitter time. I had felt exhausted, staying up to midnight every day to finish my homework. I barely had a will to keep on going anymore. The only thing keeping me going was the anxiety that I had to keep my appearance among my campus teachers. A couple of days after that and I had already begun lesson six. And as quick as I lost my will, just like a flash of light, my determination to work hard, came back. I was so awake and open. I had just read a few verses, and it had awakened me. It was like someone had added a few cubes of sugar to the bitter coffee I had been sipping until now.

My relationship with God had grown so much. Although it isn’t perfect, I finally know what it means to have a foundation. And my cup of coffee was finally sweet. Jesus was my sweetener. No matter how dark the coffee was, he came through and brought sweetness. I had then heard from one of my friends that the purple book was usually just a lecture without any homework, but due to the pandemic, they had turned it into an online youth class. I thanked God for the small light. If it weren’t for quarantine, I would have probably slacked off, and I would have never gotten this close to him. The dark time that I had been living in had gotten a little brighter.

II then understood what Rian Aditia meant when he said, “There is nothing sweeter than a cup of bitter coffee.” The sweetness of the sugar would never have tasted so good without the bitter taste. Sometimes people enjoy bitter coffee, but too much bitterness can be bad for you. That is why we have to add even a little bit of sugar or cream to our everyday coffee. I thank Jesus that he is my cream. -KT