More Than Just Tea

One of our elegantly dressed My Cup of Tea Board Members recently confided in me a seminal truth with a wink. Behind her winsome glamour and feminine composure, she could be a car mechanic.  Her father taught her to own a car, not just drive one.  She knew its oil, tires, and the rhythm of its engine.  It was inherited power, and she was willing to share it with the ladies. At my request, she joined us for lunch recently to give her insights.

 My hidden agenda was for her to address the contagious mindset of many Orange Mound ladies during tax season.   Many will receive needed incoming cash from the use of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It is a refundable tax credit for low-to-moderate-income working individuals. The amounts vary and people with children qualify for more, but the amount of the credit compared to the amount of taxes most pay often results in a not insignificant refund. Our guest suspected that most of the ladies weren’t planning on applying  the refund dollars to savings, interest on debts, or tithes.  

“How do you plan to spend your tax refund?” she asked. In unison, most shouted, “A CAR!”

She had earned their respect with her reported savvy in repairing and maintaining automobiles, so she easily held their attention with the more critical subject of purchasing one.

 She came prepared.  She hit them with a pop quiz on used car smartness hoping to uncover a secret gearhead in our group.  Only one in our classroom of twelve knew   what Carfax was.  She continued and governed their riveted attentiveness as she filled our white board with lists of the clever tricks the used car salesmen have mastered.

 All learned quite a bit, and at least that day, each committed to be more alert and suspicious of the smooth auspicious scams that await the uninformed and overzealous who need a dependable car.

                Transportation is the #1 priority for them, for without it they feel, and are truly stuck. Lack of reliable transportation is a massive, often overlooked, structural barrier in the lives of the women. It limits job access, shopping radius, punctuality, and reliability.  Countless call-ins because the car won’t start is common to our workdays at MCOT. Often the truancy that plagues our neighborhood schools is the result of mom without a reliable car.  To stay mobile, many use Uber Rides, which cuts into the margins of cash for essentials and any attempt to save.

 Our solution to meet their transportation emergencies during the workdays at the tea company is providing a reliable, licensed, insured, and gracious carpool driver employee. My Cup of Tea provides fuel and car maintenance for her vehicle.

The car is no more critical than the road they take.

                Among assistance to the myriad needs and requests of our ladies, and the provisions and guidelines we offer, our focus is lasered to guiding them to the safe streets of life. We can’t control the elements, but we can co-pilot as they navigate their personal journey. We are devoted to helping them read the map, find the way, and reach their destinations. Important life decisions--whom to trust, where to go, how to grow, and what to know--are located along the way.

 Today’s map of choice is GPS. The Global Positioning System, familiar and easily accessible, shows you as a blue dot, and your destination is a red dot.  Your route is the line that connects. The Mentors with whom the ladies have bonded offer  Godly Perspective Service.  They are each a GPS for coaching and praying through reliable external and internal complexities that everyone must face.  Navigating any new neighborhood is challenging, especially when done without a reliable signal.

Poverty is exhausting.

There are one-way streets to destruction, bumpy lanes under construction, blind alleys, and blockades that keep one simply circling the block and repeating the cycle one just left.

Poverty is relentless.

Many of our employees come to us during a time of financial hardship, often utilizing public assistance programs to meet basic needs. They often lack the knowledge and the sharp, rested mind to navigate complex systemic poverty. The offramp is not well marked.

Poverty is systemic.

We often discuss their hopes and prayers for their children and grandchildren. They work sacrificially, dedicated to securing a better life for them. They point the illumined headlights of their broken-down cars toward the better choices on the other side of the many traffic stops. Life’s path to the promised land of independence and economic stability is missing streetlights.

With mentors and our wraparound embrace of each, we are bulldozing some of the roadblocks away. Prayers are many for their patience to wait for the honest car salesman and purchase of a dependable car.  Once she is in the driver’s seat with a full tank of hope, we will join in the road trip focusing on the GPS to greater prosperity and stay within the speed limits leaving poverty in the dust.

Thursday was a weary day draped in dreary gray, not uncommon to this time of year. At My Cup of Tea, our central heat was challenged to keep us warm and comfortable.  All the ladies had defaulted to self-pity and yammering about life’s flaws and slights. Our work assignments were unchallenging and laborious. Debbie had all of them totaling inventory and sweeping together product markdowns for our customers who still have solvency after the Christmas season.  

Solvency was not in the conversations around the worktables. Several had asked when the annual federal tax refunds would be available. Tax refunds provide ample financial relief for low-income families in early February. Many of the ladies qualify, prompting impatience and a catalog of woes for the delay.

Mired in discontent, four of them knocked on the office door hoping for an interest free loan from our piggy bank. We have an emergency fund fed by a small sum of the ladies for the benefit of all. It plumps up after pay day, but after Christmas it is on life support. Though constantly urged to save, the ladies have no savings or cash reserve. Like many people, most of the ladies regularly succumb to the charm of affordable instant upgrades at the beauty aisle of the neighborhood drugstore.

Generous support from our friends and philanthropists is our lifeblood and we are constantly blessed.  On this day, however, a new and quite unlikely philanthropy graced our sullen environment with three very large brown boxes housing blankets of brilliant hue. Each had been crocheted by a male inmate from Whiteville Tennessee Correctional Facility.  Twenty-four stunningly intricately woven lap or shoulder coverings were offered in kindness by men who have no savings or tax refunds. A very good, but impossible, day for them would be to work with benefits at a secure job with heat, comfortable chairs, and the freedom to go home at the end of the workday.

As each of our ladies chose her gift and wrapped herself in the luxury of soft wool, the complaints ceased abruptly, shamed into silence by the realization that this kindness came from talented, selfless strangers who possessed nothing but time on their hands and none of the comforts and freedoms most of us take for granted. None chose to remain in an unhappy state.

             We always choose between seeing the glass as half full or half empty. It’s a choice that remains, even for those most blessed. In moments of self-pity, the Lord often gently corrects by reminding us that His provision extends beyond our material want and wishes to His agenda to heal our ungrateful and stubborn hearts.

            All adjourned after lunch with an elegant addition to her wardrobe, a genuine smile, and perhaps a notion to bless a stranger with her surplus of time and treasure and talent.

Every December, I have the glorious and satisfying privilege of acknowledging the support that is offered annually to our little enterprise called My Cup of Tea.  Signing each message of thanks is a reminder of what makes our mission so special.  Over fourteen years of concentration on loving our neighbors in Orange Mound, our experiment has amassed a collective team strength, a trusted reputation, and a shared hope for the future of each of our ladies and the ladies who will join us.

                Originally, when all of this began, my hope was to elevate and redirect the women toward independence and disengage them from the capricious government subsidies upon which they depend.   I thought financial independence would be easy.  I didn’t fully appreciate how fragile things can be for women juggling endless demands on time, transportation, and utilities, with bills piling up faster than income can flow in.

 With reserve, I have never known the absence of what is essential - the means to meet my needs, a way to move through the world, or a place of warmth or shelter.  I say this not as a point of pride, but with a humble awareness that this is a profound grace, not a given.

Originally, I wrongly envisioned mutual authentic friendship with each Orange Mound woman who crossed our front doorstep into employment.   Managing her finances would be solved in two clicks, and our team’s hospitality and personal magnetism would fill the vacuum of friendship and trust.   Earning the dollars for personal essentials by working at the tea company, I thought, would be dignifying, edifying, and ease our employees into self-sufficiency.  Prosperity was not the goal, but the means to instill confidence and a creative, rooted life.

                I read multiple books, prayed, sought advisors, and plunged into a foreign culture and community with a vision to paint hope with flat brushes and primary colors. The shallows in which I soon stood showed me I was painting by the numbers. The canvas soaked up every drop of paint and initiative. In time, the Light touched it, and gradually a remarkable original masterpiece appeared.  It was not at all related to the one I had envisioned.  The freedom and art of foregoing a step-by-step approach to success was less about following a plan and more about witnessing God’s vision come to life.  Something organic and quite beautiful, and indescribable, has evolved.

                The Bible tells the reader at least four hundred times to go to the poor, give to the poor, pray for the poor, defend the poor, protect them, sacrifice for them, and present unconditional love for the poor as central to faithful living.  Jesus’ life on earth and teachings elevate this responsibility. How we treat the vulnerable is directly tied to our relationship with God.  In essence, acting justly, mercifully, and without reservation is the requirement. (Micah 6:8)

                The late Tim Keller, pastor and theologian, answered one of my questions, “Why the poor and why four hundred times?"  Why not old women and men? Why not specific people groups, children, or the lost?  Keller says, “We give to the poor because they can’t reciprocate.”  It mirrors the Gospel.  We model the need, and the Lord models the way we should do it.

In truth, we are the poor, and we cannot earn grace or reciprocate the immeasurable gift we have received. Undeserving and once impossibly anchored in sorrow and futility, we who have been born again are given the irrefutable reality that we are fully known and fully loved.  Our needs are met and our future outweighs the present.  Everything sad and bad will be undone one day.

We serve the ladies from the unshakable place of a never ceasing wellspring that pours into our hearts through the Holy Spirit and out into the broken and raw landscape of Orange Mound. The My Cup of Tea administrators, volunteers, and you, who are our supporters, are conduits of His living water reviving and reimagining the future for our beloved women, both for now, and for Eternity.

Thank you for standing with us.  Your support is a measurable blessing now, and with more ladies in view, the rewards for you are without measure, and the masterpiece is priceless.