Covenants and Coffee Cups

This morning I spent about an hour on my deck amongst my plants enjoying my coffee from a little yellow cup I bought Up North. Every year we stop at the little antique shop in town to buy something. Nothing fancy or expensive. Always something that will be absorbed into my life to give me a reminder of what I love and all I have. Most years I look for an old hymnal for a collection I'm building, started with the old green hymn book I worshiped from in childhood. The song leader from those days, Frank Barta, let me have one of the books and thus began my collection.
A few years back I wanted an old stuffed monkey, you can guess the genesis of that! The Mr. talked me out of it and I bought an antique necklace instead but couldn't get that stuffed monkey out of my mind. My mom sent my dad to the shop when he went to the cottage and they gave me that monkey for my birthday one year.
This year there were no hymnals or monkeys so I got a little yellow coffee cup for $1.20. Do you remember the days of coffee cups, not mugs? Living in my grandparents house I still use many of their belongings amongst which are coffee cups. I will admit to importing many of my own giant mugs. But the little yellow cup reminded me of one they might have used. I don't now that it is old enough to call an antique, maybe circa late 1960s? Perhaps not even that old. The price tag hints that it is not old enough to be of any value. But I like it and I use it in the mornings and today I used it as I sat on my deck.
When you don't use a coffee MUG, you have to refill more often. That means you are always sipping hot coffee instead of luke warm coffee having cooled in the cup. Maybe there's something to this coffee cup idea. So I sat and sipped and watched the birds and threw Donny's tennis ball approximately 200 times and in general, had a nice start to my day.
I also awoke this morning with the story of the Ark of the Covenant and its return to Israel under the rule of King David. I'm going to spend some time revisiting that passage of scripture and remembering the lesson of the glory of God and how we become so hardened to holiness and true worship.
Maybe those old hymnals and little yellow coffee cup are important to me because they make me pause in the middle of my life to remember the things that came before and that time should not dilute my appreciation of what is sacred, of what God has done. It is what He has done that promises what He will yet do. And that is what turns quiet faith into shouts of praise.
Let me never move so far forward in my life to leave the covenant under which I live to be forgotten. I will always reach back to bring the glory of the past with me as Christ defines my future.

2 Samuel 6:1 David again brought together out of Israel chosen men, thirty thousand in all. 2 He and all his men set out from Baalah of Judah to bring up from there the ark of God, which is called by the Name, the name of the LORD Almighty, who is enthroned between the cherubim that are on the ark.