Potted Tea Meets Potted Palm

Regular readers might recall my affection for Earl Grey tea. Despite its being a little dearer in shops and tea rooms, its more distinctive flavour is rather more refreshing than the more common teas quaffed by the undiscerning. Yet my first acquaintance with the blend was not a pleasant one.

I was aged twenty, and had been engaged to preach at Eastcombe Baptist Chapel in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds. I was still was at university, and looked a little uncomfortable in my cheap, Topman suit and longish hair. A Mr Johnson, who may have been a deacon, had me back for supper after the evening service, ahead of the morrow’s train journey home. He was a proper, old-fashioned gentleman: neatly presented in a dark suit and white shirt, his cuffs suitably linked. I heard that he wore a bowler hat to attend his place of work, though I saw no evidence that Lord’s Day. After the food, he brought through a teapot with teacups and saucers. “Early Grey?”, he asked.

“Er, yes, please”, I replied, not knowing what it was. I did not drink tea at the best of times, but this stuff seemed flowery and more pungent than the regular tea to which my grandmother was addicted. After a few sips I resolved not to drink any more, biding my time. He asked me if I liked it, and I assured him that I thought it had a most remarkable flavour. After a while, he left the room to restock the biscuits (the consumption of which offered me little difficulty) and I poured the tea into a nearby plant pot.

Upon leaving, during our farewells, he presented me with a whole box of Earl Grey teabags because of my liking it so much. Perhaps he perceived the speedily drained china cup, and thought I had drunk it with alacrity on account of its wonderful taste. I received the gift with a smile, while wondering what I was going to do with the stinking stuff.

I called my grandmother when I got home and she fell about laughing. She did not like it either, and I do not know what happened to my first box of Earl Grey tea. Yet what was only fit for the plant pot 25 years ago is now a regular staple of my tea cupboard, the go-to beverage in my respectable home. Well this goes to prove that tastes change, attitudes alter, opinions morph. Christ, whom we might once have seen as an enemy, a fable or an irrelevance, has become so real, so important, so beautiful, in our lives, as we embrace Him and call Him our friend. Saul of Tarsus hated Him and His people, but soon grew to love Him, so that he could pen those beautiful and dramatic words of Galatians chapter 2:

I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me; and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me. (v20)

The man who no longer feeds Earl Grey tea to potted palms considers the One whose law he broke (and still breaks) as his dearest, closest friend, one who ‘sticketh closer than brother’.