Trump's Starbucks and sweet freedom

When I lived in Manhattan, one of my favorite things to do was sit in one of the borough’s endless number of Starbucks to glance at the paper, work on my computer, study the Bible, etc.

More than once I had friends tell me I should write a guide to NYC’s Starbucks because I was so familiar with them and all their quirks, including the type of people and unique city view you got with each one. Celebrities I’ve sat only a few tables away from inside various neighborhood locations include comedian Jackie Mason, 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl (who was actually busily working away on what had to have been a deadline story), and Chelsea Clinton, who sat Indian-style on the floor with an open laptop that was plugged into the wall her back was against.

What surprised some NYC friends is that I regarded as my very favorite Starbucks the one located on the second floor of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue just below Central Park. Simply walking into the super-ornate luxury high-rise, accessible to any one no matter what your dress or shoes, was a treat and the smartly uniformed doormen were always so welcoming and good-natured.

I’d go straight to the same escalator with the marble water cascade that Trump is often seen on camera being interviewed next to. Anytime I needed to use the bathroom, I'd go down to the lower floor and pass a little gift shop in which Trump’s books were always on display in the window. The uniformed women attendants inside the pristine pink restroom were always so professional.

The front section of Trump’s Starbucks offers balcony seating, which I was often able to snag. It overlooks the bustling lobby as well as 5th Avenue, Tiffany's and the famous Crown Building with its gold-laden façade.

So many visits to this Starbucks were spent sitting by myself reading books about the Bible, always listening to KJV-narrator Alexander Scourby on the walks over and back from my apartment at 48^th and 10^th near the Hudson River.

Often after I finished up at Trump’s Starbucks, if the weather was accommodating, I’d make a quick excursion over to my park bench at the duck pond in the "front yard" of Central Park, across the street from The Plaza and just below where the horses line up for carriage rides.

I called it my bench because it has a plaque with an engraved caricature of a blonde woman and the dedicatory words “For Lisa.” The smiling thirty-something lady with earrings and a dress blouse actually kind of looks like me!

I accidentally happened upon this bench one afternoon shortly after my dad died very shockingly in October 2001, only a month after 9/11. I was so filled with grief that I called in sick from work that beautiful, warm Fall day and just wandered aimlessly around the city. I was simply looking for a place to sit and cry.

******

In honor of the last night’s election, here’s a great old sermon outtake from my pastor, Richard Jordan:

God Almighty loves freedom. It’s a basic function of His character and His nature. Now if you take a list of theology books about the essence of His deity, you’ll see attributes such as “omnipotence, omniscience, omnipresence and eternal life and love and grace and immutability and righteousness.” But you won’t see freedom. It should be there, not just as an attribute, but as a function.

God loves freedom. He loves to just go be Himself— unrestricted, unrestrained, un-held back. Just go be His giving self. The heart of God is a heart of giving. It’s a life of living for others.

God the Father lives for God the Son. Ephesians 1 says He wants His Son to be exalted as the head of all things in the heavens and in the earth.

God the Holy Spirit lives to see Jesus Christ glorified. God the Son lives to glorify the Father. You know what they’re doing—they’re living for each other. 

The Divine principle of life is freely living for others. And when you see great Christian activity, you see that giving spirit of God living in His people.

William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army and a great warrior for Christ, was asked on his death bed to send a Christmas message to his troops around the world, and he wrote one word on a telegram: “Others.”

God loves freedom to just go and give. He loves freedom so much that when He made man, He gave man freedom. He was willing to put at risk His eternal purpose and plan, and pleasure and design, in order to vest you and me with liberty and freedom.

What grace does is it exalts freedom and liberty to the highest point possible. We’re not led to be under a performance system that requires some performance from you in order for God, or anyone else, to accept you.

Under a system of grace,  there’s  an understanding that you don’t live for yourself, and for your own pleasures and desires, but you’re living for another and for His glory. That’s real freedom.

Now, freedom scares people. That’s why it’s so easy to put people under legalism, because if I tell you what to do, who’s responsible?

Folks, the way your life pleases God is not by putting yourself under a performance system, and saying, “Boy, if I go out and win 10 people to Jesus today, God’s going to be happy with me.” Or, “If I give $50,000 to missions this year, God’s going to be happy with me.” That isn’t it.

The way your life is going to make God happy is for you to find out what His pleasure is—what His plan is and what He’s doing, then have that be what you’re doing.

You know how it’s had? Not by a performance system, but by being filled with some wisdom and knowledge. By understanding who we are and understanding the competency that gives us in Christ.

You see, that wisdom makes us confident to handle these things. If you’ve got convictions, you don’t have to make a lot of decisions. A lot of the decisions are made for you by your convictions.

*****

With the level of spiritual deception away from biblical truth being what it is now in America, many Bible Believers believe we’re back in almost a 1^st Century kind of situation. You can actually look at Paul’s day and the surroundings for his ministry and realize, “Whoa, the environment he’s in is the one I’m in!”

Jordan made the point that if you went to a White Sox game 50-75 years ago, you’d find 75 percent of the people in attendance would tell you they believed the Bible was the Word of God, but today that number would be less than 20 percent.

“We live in an age where unless you go out of your way for your children to learn the Word of God, they’re not going to be exposed to it.

“When I was growing up, we learned it in school. We didn’t study the Bible as a textbook, but we studied it from a perspective that taught us the stories of the Bible, and when I was a young man 40 years ago, if you’d talked to me about David and Goliath or Noah in the Ark, I’d know who you were talking about because I’d heard the stories.

“Kids today don’t know the stories; they’re completely detached from the heritage that we have as part of Western civilization and that’s part of the undercutting and destroying of our culture.

“The institutions of a culture that are assigned the responsibility of passing on the values of a culture—the home, the churches and the schools—have all abandoned their jobs. Homes let the school do it, and schools are now socialistic conclaves trying just to socialize people and homogenize them.

“As for the churches, why it’s been so long since you could find a church that had enough spiritual power—if spiritual power were gunpowder they couldn’t blow the wax out of their ears. That’s why they’re all in politics because the only choice they have is to go to the political realm to have some power and influence in the culture and the community they live in.

“And you’re noticing it’s all smoke and mirrors. It isn’t real and it’s kind of coming home to roost for people right now as the pendulum swings back and forth.

"You don’t meet people who’ve actually studied the Bible for what it is, and looked at it for what it is, who don’t believe it. It’s always the people who haven’t studied it for what it really is who don’t believe it.

“I flew on airplane from Chicago to San Diego one time and I was sitting next to a professor from Stanford University who told me how he didn’t believe the Bible—it was full of fairy tales. And I said, ‘Wow, a guy like you with a research degree, a PhD.—you must have read the Bible a lot to come to that conclusion?’ But I came to find out he’d never read the Bible. Well, no wonder he thought it was all fairy tales. If that’s all you ever got, you would too.

“If all you’ve ever heard about the Bible is what you read in books like ‘The Da Vinci Code,’ well, no wonder.”

"The bottom line is you can’t be a product of Western civilization without understanding the fundamental foundation upon which it was founded, namely the Bible.

“And whether you’re a Believer or not, the principles, the ethics, the thinking pattern that come out of the Word of God is still the foundation of our culture. It’s where the value system comes from. And it has its social impact. Well, if your children have never been taught just that. . .”