BRITT AVERY, KVN DIGITAL MEDIA PRODUCER
If you look at my Twitter page, just about every other tweet is related to how or why I spilled my coffee.
Whether it was on my sweats, on my laptop, on a paper I was about to turn in, or on my suit and tie before a job interview, I have found that college has turned me into a klutz.
I go from having the best day ever, or sometimes the worst day ever, and a simple coffee spill completely redirects my focus on life. Just a simple coffee spill and I lose sight of everything else because something unexpected happened.
While coffee is the liquid fuel that runs through my veins and keeps me going, my faith is the thing that keeps me driven, even when I spill my coffee. Aside from my alarm clock(s), my faith is what gives me a reason to get out of bed every morning, and every morning, I get another chance to make the world a better place.
So what really is faith then? Is it a band-aid when a bad day is beginning to cloud my day, and everything is all fine and dandy, or is it more than simply being optimistic?
Well for me, it’s been a Christian faith, but never a defined Christian faith. It’s something that came from being raised up for the first half of my youth in a church full of people that loved on me and my single mom at the time, regardless of what troubles we faced. My faith was in God, and I trusted that He would work on the future, while I worked on the present and learned from the past.
We continued to go the distance, and eventually moved from South Carolina to Iowa. My mom married my step-dad and I graduated from a fantastic high school to later enroll at Wartburg College to write this blog about frequent coffee spills and faith.
“Ain’t that something?” as my southern family would say.
And for others, faith is something different for them, and something special to them. Some have faith in Allah. Some have faith in Buddha. Some even have faith in things like their team winning the Super Bowl, sorry 49ers fans.
For college students that grew up without faith or those that left their faith on the shelf, sometimes their faith is in their ability to finish something at the last minute. For those that prefer structure, their faith may have to be in their professors who might not be on top of things, and wait until the last week of the semester to post grades online.
And that’s just it: we all have faith. We just have to recognize where our faith comes from, what it means to us, and why it is that we have faith.
If your faith is in your abilities to graduate, or even to persevere through a crazy disorganized Monday after waking up late to your 7:45 a.m. class, then that’s where your faith lies.
Now, it’s up to you to find others who have a similar faith to you, if you haven’t already done so, and challenge one another to do the above and beyond and to go the distance. Even if you spill coffee, it’s going to be OK.
One of my favorite Bible verses about faith says this:
“Faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we cannot see.”
Hebrews 11:1
If you’re receiving this message, it’s because you’ve made it through more than a dozen coffee spills, as have I. Some coffee spills are legit coffee spills, and others are when we trip and mess up in an athletic event, we do terrible on a test, or worse.
Sometimes we get phone calls about a lost a loved one. Other times, we find out our relationships aren’t going to work out or the path we set up for ourselves was not the path you ended up going down.
But I was recently reminded by my best friend, Blake, that just like Noah and his big ole’ ark of animals: sometimes we experience a major flood before we see the big rainbow at the end of the horizon saying it’s going to be OK.
Next time you end up spilling coffee or you see me or someone else spilling coffee, remind yourself and others that coffee spills happen to remind us we’re human, and we will always prevail if we just have faith.
Live, love, and be loved.
Knight Wire 
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