50 beans | dream job, reborn

picture shamelessly pilfered from the NYT coffee page

Every once in a while, whether it'd be chatting with a coworker, during a job interview, or doing introductions at fellowship, I'll get asked what my dream job is. This happens at least once a month. Depending on what my mood is, I'll either say: an economist with the IMF (they do loan/aid packages for struggling countries), working for the post office (mail-sorting machines seem fun), or more recently, opening a coffee shop (if you're ever bored, ask me about the flying coffee concept).

Well, now I have a new dream job. Ever since I started randomly posting about coffee, I've been upping my curiosity not just for various methods of brewing or different types of coffee, but I've also been getting curious about the caffeine influenced society and coffee culture. There's so much to learn about the magical world of coffee, and David McCullough (1776 guy) affirms that one of the best ways to learn about something you know little of is to write about it.

Oliver Strand is currently the New York Times coffee curator (doesn't that sound like awesome title?!) and maintains the Times Topic on coffee. He mostly travels around the NY area to keep up on local coffee happenings and stuff, but will occasionally travel around the world to keep up with international coffee news. Because Mr. Strand works for the NYT and gets pretty good coffee journalism credibility (if such a thing existed), he maintains great relationships with many of the independent coffee roasters around the country, and, get this, he gets free coffee all the time. Plus you get to meet interesting folks like the roasters and small shop baristas (especially the hipsters in portland with the skinny lattes/jeans, fixie bike, and the anime hair). Hot-diggity, this would be sooo cool to do (and not just for the free coffee...the coffee-related traveling's cool too), even if only for a few months. I think this job just trumped the coffeeshop/economist/post office mail-sorter dreams jobs. *sigh* if only wishing made it so...

While thinking about all the coffee-travels this job entails, I wonder if it has ever occured to anyone to do coffee-related missions? A lot of times we talk about our occupation and our workplace being our missions field, so-much-so that it's almost become a cliché. I wonder if there would be a place in missions for a coffee curator? Oliver Strand does quite a bit of travelling to meet with roasters and baristas, and occasionally going overseas to the supply side, the growers. Imagine the people you'd encounter, the farmer, the distribution guy, the person overseeing the operations of a coffee coop; basically anybody up the coffee bean processing chain. One could easily turn a coffee procurement trip into a missions trip. I realize that this is kind of targeting your ministry at a particular industry, and kind of neglecting the other people, but don't we all have to start small and go from somewhere?

On the business side, where you'd be going around and checking out coffee-shops, I wonder if there's a place for missions there? When I was working in Shanghai, I met regularly with Beth, a missionary from Wisconsin, who was well into her 60's. She moved to the city sometime in the early 1990's after her kids had moved out and gotten married/settled down. She set-up shop in the back of local restaurants and coffee houses, leading a bible study in English once a week. She ministers to those in Shanghai who are seeking to know the Lord and also those who are aching to learn some English. A good byproduct of this ministry is that she gets to try out different coffeeshops while doing this.

I feel the coffee curator job would be a perfect role for a tentmaker missionary. I'd have a professional job (drink and evaluate coffee) as a coffee curator (seriously, awesomest title ever), which gives me that creative access I would need to get into closed country. I'd also have access to a lot of people in varying roles, and be in a position to develop long-term relationships with people in the industry. BTW, did I mention the occasional free coffee??

I know...I could still do the coffee-oriented missions even without the job, but then I'd have to get a real job and stuff. Meh...that'd be more realistic, but since we are talking about dream jobs...hehe. I am starting to consider doing that here in Sac first. Afterall, Pastor Gee does challenge us that if we can't do missions in our own backyard, how are we expecting to do it in a foreign land? Possibly starting with local coffee shops and seeing where it leads? Getting paid to do something like this would be awesome though, definitely a dream job. So...what can I actually do to even get into a position like that? I have no clue, but I suppose it starts with blogging on coffee...