A Cup of Tea from Jesus

Ok, maybe not quite exactly, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute.

Probably about 6 months ago, I stopped by a Chinese Medicine shop in my neighborhood, having dealt with ongoing health issues for quite some time and still unable to come up with any solutions. I was greeted by a friendly Chinese woman who after just a minute of conversation directed me to an older Chinese gentleman, apparently “the doctor.” He took me to his office in the back of the store and did a bit of a diagnostic on me, checking my pulse, looking at my eyes, etc. As an almost instantaneous response, he muttered “stress.” I nodded in agreement.

No sooner than we had sat down in his office, we were up again, walking back to the counter to the woman I had spoken with moments earlier. The older gentleman exchanged some quick Chinese with her and she then took me around the store to grab my medicine.

There were two items she picked out for me. One was a bottle of pills for brain activity, but the one that particularly intrigued me was a box of Dong Quai tea. Perhaps what perplexed me more than anything was that the box said the tea was used for helping with female body functions…

Nevertheless, I walked with her back to the counter and paid for the two items. If I’m not mistaken, the tea cost only $5 for a box of 20 individually-packaged servings of tea. I thanked the woman, and asked what my follow-up instructions were. She almost laughed as she said there were none, just instructing me to take the pills and drink the tea and come back when I ran out if I wanted/needed more.

So, I left the store, shrugged, and went on my merry way. That night I began drinking the tea. I made one cup every night and also had a cup every morning with breakfast instead of my usual coffee. One of the first things I noticed was that the tea helped my insomnia, which wasn’t even anything I complained about! It also started warming me up a little bit, since my primary complaint was that I was (and still generally am) always cold.

After finishing up the box, I procrastinated a little bit but eventually went back to the store to get another two boxes. I started taking it again, but not as consistently (thanks to my procrastination) and eventually forgot about it, with a whole unopened box still left. Since then, my health wavered in and out from being an annoyance to being a fairly noticeable problem, but I didn’t really do much about it.

Now, this is where the story starts getting pretty wild.

Last week, I happened to be looking through a few of my boxes at a friend’s house (aka. my storage facility), and stumbled across my remaining, unopened box of tea. I was excited as I recognized it, and grabbed it to take home with me. Well, this past week, I’ve been feeling horrible, and probably my biggest complaint more than anything has been my inability to sleep, partly from anxiety and partly from my body just not wanting to fall asleep. So, I’ve begun drinking the tea again.

Well, tonight I couldn’t sleep yet again, so I went to make myself a cup of my beloved tea. However, as I was waiting for the water to boil, I noticed something that I had somehow overlooked all this time. The distributor of the tea is a Chinese company named Prince of Peace. That caught my attention, since that’s a term often used to refer to Jesus, the Son of God. Of course, this whole time I’ve just been going with the fact that the Chinese are very, very smart about this stuff, and honestly, I trust their thousands of years of knowledge of medicine over the American capitalistic healthcare scam. But what if this product somehow involved Christians in China? How awesome would that be?

Of course I was excited at first, but I wasn’t 100% sure if it was referring to Jesus or not. For all I knew, it could be another deal like how Catholics claim Mary is the “Queen of Heaven” when the Bible clearly points out and warns of a pagan goddess known as the “Queen of Heaven.” “Prince of Peace” could be some Buddhist thing or Chinese god or who knows what, so I concluded that I would never really know for sure.

Then I looked at the back of the package, and what did I see? Yeah, that’s right, an Ichthus.

It’s just funny to me how God worked this one out, down to the very last detail of the timing and everything.

I mean, it’s not as if I’ve been hearing about the rapidly growing Christian Church in China from my pastors at Kensington Church for months now or anything…

Or as if I was just reading about the significance of the Ichthus just a couple hours ago, as I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo of it…

Yeah, God’s pretty awesome.

So, looking at this whole story now, the awesome punchline is that the people making this product to help my health, utilizing the intense knowledge of Chinese medicine, are doing it in the name of Jesus Christ. Maybe it’s just me, but I think that’s pretty awesome.