The Meditative Joy of Slow Coffee

Faster is not always better.

In fact, I'd argue that in our modern world of speed and efficiency, we've created an entire generation of people who suffer from a complete lack of patience.

The worst part is that we don't even realize it.

We don't see anything wrong with it. We don't know — or can't remember — anything different.

We don't know how to be still.

We don't know how to wait.

For anything.

Instant gratification has become so ingrained in our culture that five seconds of slow Wi-Fi feels like an eternity. Five seconds for a website to load on a phone that lets us find a ride, pay for it, and watch it make its way to our exact spot on a map (sometimes without a human even driving it) — all from a small, magical slab of glass with no buttons and no cables. Five seconds, and we grumble. We never step back to marvel at what's actually happening, or at how astonishing it is that any of it is possible at all.

We've lost all sense of perspective.

And we are worse off for it. Our lives are worse for it. Our souls are worse for it.

I've been trying to find small ways throughout my day to slow down and intentionally build patience. Because as often as I tell my kids, "Just be thankful you have the internet — when I was a kid…" (yes, I'm old enough to say those things now), I suffer from the very same impatience. I'm easily frustrated waiting for almost anything.

Which brings me to slow coffee.

Much has been written about coffee, and I'm not the one to add to it. There are many who are infinitely more qualified to talk about the merits of coffee than I am. So I won't debate one brewing method over another or get into tasting notes, flavor profiles, or bean acidity. I use a glass French press because I love the taste of the coffee it produces, but you can use any pour-over method you like and enjoy the same benefits.

What I do want to tell you about is how transformative it's been to set aside eight minutes each morning to make my coffee.

Four minutes for the kettle to boil, while I grab a spoon, measure and scoop the grounds into the press, and take down one of my two favorite mugs. The water comes to a boil. I pour it slowly over the grounds and watch them bloom — that first swell of foam as the hot water wakes the coffee up and the smell fills the kitchen. I stir gently, set the lid and plunger on top, and wait.

Four more minutes for the grounds to steep. Then I press the plunger down slowly, until the filter has pushed everything to the bottom, and pour a hot cup.

Those four minutes of waiting — and the four before them — are often one of the highlights of my day. Not because anything happens. Because nothing has to.

There is nothing productive about them. I can't speed them up. The coffee will steep in its own time, no matter how I feel about it, and for once, I'm not trying to bend the clock to my will. In our world that asks every minute to earn its keep, doing one small thing slowly, with my hands, for no reason but to do it well, turns out to be quite powerful. And in that deliberate slowness, something opens up.

I pray. Not eloquently — usually it's little more than thanks and a few requests. I think. I sit in the quiet. And somewhere in those minutes I remember, before the inbox and the demands and the running list of everything I'm already behind on, that the day in front of me is a gift.

I'm not earning anything in those minutes, and that matters to me. I'm not building spiritual credit or checking a box that makes God think better of me. He could not love me more than He already does in Christ; no amount of stillness adds a thing to that. The quiet is not the price of His presence. It's only that the noise of a hurried life makes His presence so easy to miss, and slowing down clears enough space to notice what was already true — that He is here, that He is near, that "in [His] presence there is fullness of joy" (Psalm 16:11). The joy was never something the coffee produced. It was Christ's all along, waiting to be received by a heart slow enough to hold still and take it.

Brother Lawrence, who wrote "Practicing the Presence of God," was a monk who learned to know the nearness of God not in the cathedral but in the monastery kitchen — elbow-deep in dishwater, he found that the God worshiped on Sunday is just as present on a Tuesday over a sink. Or a French press. The sacred isn't reserved for the sanctuary. It meets us in the ordinary, in the most unremarkable corners of an unremarkable day, if we will only slow down long enough to encounter it.

I won't pretend it always works. Some mornings, my mind races ahead to the day's problems, the prayer comes out distracted or not at all, and I press the plunger down, already gone from the moment. Grace covers those mornings, too. I'm still learning. But more often than not, those eight minutes set the whole day on a different footing. Not because the coffee is magic, but because I've begun the morning by remembering who God is and who I am before Him.

Dallas Willard once warned that hurry does more to corrode the soul than almost anything else. Eight minutes is my small act of resistance — a daily, deliberate refusal to be rushed. A way of saying, before the world has its chance to make demands, that I belong to Someone, and that the day is His before it is ever mine.

And then I pour the cup.

Joy.