A Speaker Story for the Holiday by Paulie Sabol

The old saw says, "You are what you eat."

Well, consider this story about adversity, challenge and circumstances.

Imagine three pots of water placed on a high fire reaching a rolling boil.

Now, in the first pot place carrots, in the second place eggs, and in the last place ground coffee.

Struggle is often describe as being under fire or in the fires of life. Yet it isn't so much what happens to us as who we are and who we become which matters.

After a time, imagine the carrots, eggs, and coffee.

The carrots are now mushy. The eggs hard. The coffe grounds, unchanged.

Interestingly, the same situation led to three different results.

The carrot went in strong, hard, and unrelenting. However, after being subjected to the
boiling water, it softened and became weak.

The egg went in fragile and fluid. But after enduring the boiling water, its soft nurturing inside became inflexable.

The ground coffee beans went in and out of the boiling water unchanged; in fact, the beans changed the water.

Can we be like the coffee bean? The bean that actually changes the hot water, the very cause of pain. And can we leave the world better off where we intersect with it? Like the coffee, can we hit the floods of adversity and release a comforting, rich flavor.

So if indeed we are what we eat, get a holiday coffee!

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I first heard this story as told by Donna Fox.