Break Dancing Luther Style

In my former summer existance, before these hectic days of picking up dead bodies, setting up communion, and delivering the mail, I mowed lawns with the grounds crew. (If you don't believe me, I have a t-shirt to prove it.) Schedules being what they are, however, I have had to leave my custodial friends and participate in their endeavors solely through appreciating the fruits of their labor. (The flowers are spectacular, aren't they?)

Back when one could still find me chipping ice on crisp winter mornings, the whole maintenance staff and I would take breakfast/coffee break at 9:30 am. We would trundle into the Olson Campus Center cafeteria and grab ourselves coffee or tea from the supply provided us by the seminary. Being a newbie, I once stumbled into another room set up with beverages thinking they were for us. I later discovered they were for another segment of the Luther Seminary community. "Hmm," I thought, "Why would we need two set-ups for two break times? Why wouldn't we all just take a break together?" I have also witnessed folks coming into the grounds crew staff break time, located a dining room with plenty of chairs and tables, taking their beverage, and then retiring to another adjacent room. "Why wouldn't they want to mingle with their fellow seminary workers?" I wondered.

Sometimes in smallish communities such as ours, we turn little habits into big deals. So maybe I'm making a tempest out of some tea and a catastrophe from coffee. But, as one of my professors likes to say, let's wonder together about how we set up our lives together so as not to divide but to bring together and build up. Sometimes coffee and tea and a friendly word is a big deal to your fellow worker. Part of the the Lutheran revolution was to make the mundane sacred, that is, plumbers and electricians have an equal role building up God's people as, say, preachers and organizers. How may we be uplifting or dismissing that precept with how we take our breaks?