By CHARLES FERRUZZA
When it comes coffee, you never know what to believe. Over the years I’ve read differing medical reports that insist coffee causes cancer, coffee cures cancer, coffee is a great hair tonic, coffee causes hair to fall out and – don’t ask me where exactly I read these -- coffee either exacerbates impotence or causes erections that last for days.
This week, USA Today led off a health news story with this sentence: “Drinking up to six cups of coffee a day may lower the overall odds of dying prematurely, mainly because it cuts the risk of dying from heart disease.”
Six cups seems a little excessive. But in the event I do kick the bucket prematurely, I probably should be drinking my morning coffee at Rev Café & Gallery (2010 Main Street). A friend had told me that it was a Christian coffee shop.
I’d passed the place a dozen times or more without feeling called to step in, but my co-worker Lorna wanted to check it out. And God knows both of us could use a little Christ with our cappuccino.
The religious element at Rev Café isn’t exactly in-your-face. There aren’t any tracts or crosses that I could see in the clean and comfortable space, and I didn’t hear any Amy Grant or Sandi Patty over the sound system. But the friendly manager, Marlo, who was making drinks at that steamy espresso machine, was wearing a black T-shirt with a reference to Ezekiel 1:17 (When they went, they went in any of their four directions.) She told us that Rev Café is both the fund-raising business and the office for Lutheran Urban Mission Agency, which also operates a food pantry and utility assistance program out of the social ministry office at 715 Cesar Chavez Avenue.
“It’s an attractive place,” Lorna said as she sipped on a raspberry smoothie. I drank a single cappuccino. If I could have finished five more, I might have reduced my chances of premature death and brought me a lot closer to everlasting life in Heaven.
I'll swear on the Bible, the Rev's stuff is better than our office coffee, which I drink about six cups per day of anyway.
Posted at: June 20, 2008 3:48 PM