Chocolate & Mint Tea

During one of my Thursday afternoons spent at the chapel, someone kindly made me a cup of tea, but asked me to guess the flavour. I tasted well enough the mint, but could not quite put my finger on the other chief ingredient. It was chocolate, of course, which you will have guessed from the title, above. Now at which point a cup of warm, brown-coloured and chocolate-flavoured liquid becomes actual hot chocolate rather than tea, I do not know. Perhaps it is to do with the essential process of infusion, whereas a cup of cocoa is...just cocoa. The chocolate and mint tea reminded me of hot chocolate, but is was rather more delicate and differed in its viscosity. It tasted of chocolate, but I suspect the percentage of cocoa in the whole was inconsiderable. It gave a taste, but little more. Perhaps it is the answer to those chocoholics who deem themselves too fat, but refuse to abstain: it has all the favour, but none of the flab.

Church is like heaven, or rather a thinner, more diluted form of it. Oh, we all know how it falls shy of such a claim. Yet what is church? Disregard the hard seats, the tiresome pastor, the mildly irritating welcomer or the annoying child: attending church is a foretaste, if a rather slight one, of heaven: both are communities of redeemed people joining in the public and open worship of Almighty God; Christ attends church each week with His people much as they shall one day all attend Him before His throne; the troubling affairs of this world are briefly forgotten much as they shall be an utter irrelevance in heaven. My cup of mint and chocolate tea could not really be described as mug of hot-choc, but it contained all the flavour of its fuller, thicker alternative.

So if church is a bit like heaven, let us see it as a place whereat we might also share and express love for each other, as well as for Him of whose vast Kingdom it is part.