The Second Cup of Coffee I Pour Out Every Morning
I still set two mugs on the counter every morning before I remember I only need one. My hand does it before my mind catches up, reaching for the chipped blue one that was never actually mine to begin with, filling it alongside my own out of a habit built over eleven years of a marriage that ended two years ago. Some mornings I catch myself before the coffee pot finishes pouring. Most mornings I do not, and I stand there with two full mugs steaming on the counter and only one person in the kitchen to drink them, and I pour the second one down the sink like I am performing some small private funeral I never agreed to attend.
I used to think loneliness was something that happened to other people, quieter men than the one I used to be. My old life was loud on purpose, packed with people who called themselves friends and mostly wanted a bar tab covered or a ride somewhere they should not have been going. I mistook noise for connection for a long time, and it took losing all of it, the marriage, most of those friends, a decade of my own choosing, to discover that a house full of people had never actually kept me from being alone. It only kept me from noticing.
Sobriety took the noise away and left the truth standing in the kitchen with me. Some of the people who called themselves friends only existed inside the noise and did not survive its ending. My kids visit every other weekend and love me, but a house is quiet in a specific way on the Tuesday afternoons they are not here that no visit can undo. I go to meetings, and I am grateful for every face in that room, and I still drive home to an apartment where the loudest sound most nights is a coffee pot finishing a job nobody but me will finish drinking.
Scripture does not treat this ache as a modern invention. It goes back further than I expected, further back than sin itself. Before anything had gone wrong in the garden, God looked at the one man He had made and said something that still surprises me every time I read it. "And the LORD God said, 'It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him'" (Genesis 2:18, NKJV). Not good. God said that about loneliness before He ever said it about sin. It was built into the design of a human being to need presence, which means the ache I feel pouring out that second mug is not a flaw in my faith. It is evidence I am exactly the kind of creature He made.
David wrote from inside a loneliness far more literal than mine, hiding in caves with men counting him as good as dead. "Look on my right hand and see, For there is no one who acknowledges me; Refuge has failed me; No one cares for my soul" (Psalm 142:4, NKJV). I have said a version of that sentence to my own ceiling more nights than I want to admit, and finding it already written in Scripture, prayed by a man God called after His own heart, has done more for me than any advice ever has. He is not the only one who said it. "Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me, For I am desolate and afflicted" (Psalm 25:16, NKJV) sounds almost too plain to be prayer, and yet there it sits, inspired and preserved, proof that naming the ache honestly has never disqualified a person from God's attention.
What David does next is the part I keep missing on my own. He does not stop at naming the loneliness. He turns it toward the one relationship that was never actually going to leave. "When my father and my mother forsake me, Then the LORD will take care of me" (Psalm 27:10, NKJV). I have spent two years measuring my worth by who still shows up, tallying the friends who stopped calling against the ones who stayed, as if that ledger could ever settle the actual ache. It cannot, because the ache was never really about a tally. It was about a presence no tally can supply.
Here is where my own reasoning has nothing left to give me. I can talk myself through the math of who left and why, build a perfectly logical case for why the apartment is quiet on Tuesdays, and none of that reasoning has ever once made the quiet feel less empty. Reasoning explains loneliness. It has never once cured it. Moses told a whole generation something that reaches past explanation into an actual promise. "Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the LORD your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you" (Deuteronomy 31:6, NKJV). Goes with. Present tense, not a historical fact about a God who used to walk with people in gardens and deserts.
Jesus told His own disciples, on the night before He left them in a way that must have felt like the loneliest abandonment imaginable, that leaving was not actually what was happening. "I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you" (John 14:18, NKJV). Orphans is a strong word, and He chose it on purpose, naming the exact fear underneath every empty kitchen I have ever stood in. He did not promise to send someone else in His place. He promised to come Himself, abiding by His Spirit in the very silence I keep mistaking for absence.
This is what abiding actually does that my own coping never could. It is not a technique for tolerating an empty apartment better. It is an actual presence, filling the space my reasoning kept insisting was vacant. "Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand" (Isaiah 41:10, NKJV). I have read that verse as poetry for years. Standing at that counter, it reads like the only accurate description of what is actually happening in the room. Paul finishes the thought further out than I could ever reason my own way to. "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39, NKJV). Not even an empty chair at my own kitchen table makes that list.
I still set two mugs out some mornings, and I do not think that habit is going anywhere soon. But yesterday I let the second cup sit a minute longer before I poured it out, and prayed instead of just standing there, and something filled that kitchen that no houseguest, no meeting, no phone call has ever quite managed to fill on its own. God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which room in your life feels the emptiest right now. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on who else walks through that door, and He will never leave you standing there alone.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 2:18; Psalm 142:4; Psalm 25:16; Psalm 27:10; Deuteronomy 31:6; John 14:18; Isaiah 41:10; Romans 8:38-39.
I used to think loneliness was something that happened to other people, quieter men than the one I used to be. My old life was loud on purpose, packed with people who called themselves friends and mostly wanted a bar tab covered or a ride somewhere they should not have been going. I mistook noise for connection for a long time, and it took losing all of it, the marriage, most of those friends, a decade of my own choosing, to discover that a house full of people had never actually kept me from being alone. It only kept me from noticing.
Sobriety took the noise away and left the truth standing in the kitchen with me. Some of the people who called themselves friends only existed inside the noise and did not survive its ending. My kids visit every other weekend and love me, but a house is quiet in a specific way on the Tuesday afternoons they are not here that no visit can undo. I go to meetings, and I am grateful for every face in that room, and I still drive home to an apartment where the loudest sound most nights is a coffee pot finishing a job nobody but me will finish drinking.
Scripture does not treat this ache as a modern invention. It goes back further than I expected, further back than sin itself. Before anything had gone wrong in the garden, God looked at the one man He had made and said something that still surprises me every time I read it. "And the LORD God said, 'It is not good that man should be alone; I will make him a helper comparable to him'" (Genesis 2:18, NKJV). Not good. God said that about loneliness before He ever said it about sin. It was built into the design of a human being to need presence, which means the ache I feel pouring out that second mug is not a flaw in my faith. It is evidence I am exactly the kind of creature He made.
David wrote from inside a loneliness far more literal than mine, hiding in caves with men counting him as good as dead. "Look on my right hand and see, For there is no one who acknowledges me; Refuge has failed me; No one cares for my soul" (Psalm 142:4, NKJV). I have said a version of that sentence to my own ceiling more nights than I want to admit, and finding it already written in Scripture, prayed by a man God called after His own heart, has done more for me than any advice ever has. He is not the only one who said it. "Turn Yourself to me, and have mercy on me, For I am desolate and afflicted" (Psalm 25:16, NKJV) sounds almost too plain to be prayer, and yet there it sits, inspired and preserved, proof that naming the ache honestly has never disqualified a person from God's attention.
What David does next is the part I keep missing on my own. He does not stop at naming the loneliness. He turns it toward the one relationship that was never actually going to leave. "When my father and my mother forsake me, Then the LORD will take care of me" (Psalm 27:10, NKJV). I have spent two years measuring my worth by who still shows up, tallying the friends who stopped calling against the ones who stayed, as if that ledger could ever settle the actual ache. It cannot, because the ache was never really about a tally. It was about a presence no tally can supply.
Here is where my own reasoning has nothing left to give me. I can talk myself through the math of who left and why, build a perfectly logical case for why the apartment is quiet on Tuesdays, and none of that reasoning has ever once made the quiet feel less empty. Reasoning explains loneliness. It has never once cured it. Moses told a whole generation something that reaches past explanation into an actual promise. "Be strong and of good courage, do not fear nor be afraid of them; for the LORD your God, He is the One who goes with you. He will not leave you nor forsake you" (Deuteronomy 31:6, NKJV). Goes with. Present tense, not a historical fact about a God who used to walk with people in gardens and deserts.
Jesus told His own disciples, on the night before He left them in a way that must have felt like the loneliest abandonment imaginable, that leaving was not actually what was happening. "I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you" (John 14:18, NKJV). Orphans is a strong word, and He chose it on purpose, naming the exact fear underneath every empty kitchen I have ever stood in. He did not promise to send someone else in His place. He promised to come Himself, abiding by His Spirit in the very silence I keep mistaking for absence.
This is what abiding actually does that my own coping never could. It is not a technique for tolerating an empty apartment better. It is an actual presence, filling the space my reasoning kept insisting was vacant. "Fear not, for I am with you; Be not dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you, Yes, I will help you, I will uphold you with My righteous right hand" (Isaiah 41:10, NKJV). I have read that verse as poetry for years. Standing at that counter, it reads like the only accurate description of what is actually happening in the room. Paul finishes the thought further out than I could ever reason my own way to. "For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39, NKJV). Not even an empty chair at my own kitchen table makes that list.
I still set two mugs out some mornings, and I do not think that habit is going anywhere soon. But yesterday I let the second cup sit a minute longer before I poured it out, and prayed instead of just standing there, and something filled that kitchen that no houseguest, no meeting, no phone call has ever quite managed to fill on its own. God is alive this morning, and He already knows exactly which room in your life feels the emptiest right now. He has a plan for you that was never contingent on who else walks through that door, and He will never leave you standing there alone.
---
Scriptures used (NKJV): Genesis 2:18; Psalm 142:4; Psalm 25:16; Psalm 27:10; Deuteronomy 31:6; John 14:18; Isaiah 41:10; Romans 8:38-39.
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