A Starbucks Conversation: Good News, Or Not?

The other day, as I sat at Starbucks, a guy across from me saw a girl in line that he worked with. They began talking, as people do, and pretty soon I started hearing some scripture being referenced. Starbucks is like the Christian bar, so that didn’t really surprise me and I didn’t really tune in to the conversation. But soon enough, I heard the guy’s voice elevate slightly, his tone get a slightly more intense, and the girl wasn’t saying anything. His intensity got my attention.

What I heard was him asking what she would do if she stood face to face with the God of the universe today. If she were being judged before a God who demands perfection, she would not be found perfect. “Your mouth would be shut,” he told her, “and you would be standing before God, under his wrath.” He mentioned multiple times that she may not make it to work today, she may not make it home, she could die any second and come face to face with a wrathful God. Then he asked if she would repent and accept righteousness in Jesus so that the wrath of God may be appeased.

She was very uncomfortable. She tried to get out of the conversation, to which he replied, “You just waited for your drink, now just wait a few more minutes while I share this with you. You never know if we’ll even make it to work today, so I want to share it now.”

At the end of the conversation, clearly perturbed, the girl said, “You just wasted minutes of my life,” and she walked away.

I think I’m still processing the conversation. I’m processing how he presented what is supposed to be Good News. I’m processing how dejected she felt afterwards. There’s a lot to process just in those two things.

The truth is, when I take apart everything the guy said, there is nothing technically wrong. What he shared is theologically correct. It’s orthodox Christianity. It’s scriptural truth. We are fallen creatures, deserving of the wrath of God, separated from Him by our sin. It is by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross that the penalty for our sin is paid and that we have right standing with God. We don’t know when we will die. Accidents happen all the time. And when we come to judgment, if we are not found in Christ, we have no hope for satisfying the perfect standard of God. If we are not found in Christ, we don’t have His atoning sacrifice to pardon us from the just punishment for our sin.

The Good News is that Jesus made such provision. The Good News is that He took the punishment we deserved so that we could come before God in right standing, rather than marred by our sin.

There’s nothing technically wrong with any of his statements. Honestly, I think his boldness is admirable. So why do I feel like the conversation was not a good one? Probably, in part, because the girl left feeling dejected – a feeling notably absent when sinners encountered Jesus. Also probably because the girl tried to get away, stayed against her will, and her role in the conversation was relegated to the silent listener. None of that feels good. My eight year old daughter doesn’t enjoy being held against her will and talked down to; adults don’t like it either. But, I’m jumping ahead.

Why did she feel dejected when she left the conversation? Well, to be honest, it could be because people don’t like to come face to face with the truth that they aren’t the supreme being in the universe. Autonomy is the philosophy of the West. “Live your truth” is the creed. When you’ve been strolling along in a world where you are the center, where your desires are the desires that matter, and the only offensive things are the things that offend you, it’s a little jarring to hear that maybe you’re actually subject to somebody or something else. To hear that there is a standard, an objective standard, that you will be held to whether you agree with it or not, and that you will certainly be found guilty of missing that standard, is a pretty tough pill to swallow. Add to it that the judge of that standard is an invisible guy in the sky, and to a modern Westerner it’s not just offensive, it’s absurd. No wonder she said the conversation was a waste of her time.

However, I don’t think her inability to break out of the autonomy of the West was the only issue at hand here. The thing that seemed noticeably absent in the conversation was her. Not only was she silent through most of it, not really given the place to speak aside from responding to, “Have you ever sinned? Have you ever told a lie?” but her thoughts, her questions, and her life situations were all absent from the conversation.

When Jesus interacted with people, He acknowledged the person. He spoke to their current life situation. He wasn’t just interested in them getting to Heaven. He didn’t just speak to them about when they stood before God in judgment. He was interested in the here and now. He didn’t say things like, “This world doesn’t matter. Eternity matters,” which was another thing the guy from Starbucks said, which I completely disagree with. Instead, Jesus acknowledged the adultery of the woman at the well and then revealed to her that He was the messiah; Jesus forgave the sins of the paralyzed man and then told him to get up and walk home; Jesus was amazed at the faith of a Gentile centurion and healed his servant; Jesus sought out the woman with the issue of blood who was an outcast and had committed a punishable act by coming in among the crowd while she was unclean, and he healed her. Jesus didn’t tell them about the wrath of God they were under, He acknowledged the Hell they were already in, He healed it, and He invited them to live in that kind of Heaven forever.

The Starbucks conversation was absent of any relevance to the girl’s life outside of the fact that she was destined for eternal punishment. There was nothing acknowledging the Hell she may be going through right now, nothing acknowledging how God wanted to change that for her and for all those around her, nothing acknowledging that God knew anything about her situation at all aside from that she wasn’t worthy to be near Him. Is that the Good News? Is that what Jesus modeled to us? I’m not so sure.

Was the conversation fruitful? I hope so. I hope that the truth of our fallen nature and the truth that Jesus paid the penalty for that somehow hits home for the girl. But I also think there was a big part of the conversation missing. When God made the world, He said it was good. Everything bad – the suffering, the pain, the poverty, the Hell that people live every day – is a result of people making the choice to serve themselves over making the choice to serve each other and serve God. God’s goal is to restore creation back to that goodness. His goal isn’t to condemn people to Hell. The reason Jesus came wasn’t just to get us into Heaven, it was to demonstrate how God wanted to interact with the world, to show what it looks like when a person lives how God wants them to live, to make earth look more like Heaven. Yes, Jesus paid the penalty we deserve for not living that way. He also demonstrated that God wants our lives and the lives of every single person around us to change. Salvation isn’t just about Heaven, it’s about redeeming all of creation and allowing God to use us to make it look like the Heaven he created it to be.

I wonder how the girl at Starbucks would have walked away if she had known that.