Coffee Chats

HOW PALATE COFFEE WAS BORN PART ONE

written by Tina Kadolph

Welcome Friends,

I am excited to share with you this month on how Palate Coffee Brewery was born. The amazing coffee that you have the opportunity to buy not only supports the fight against human trafficking but also the Voice of Of Truth magazine and Women World Leaders. This coffee is life-changing! Literally!

Palate has so many amazing God stories I cannot wait to share with you. One of the beautiful stories behind Palate is how it was born.

It really goes all the way back to 2011 when our daughter and son-in-love were just finishing up their stay on the mission field. While in South America, God had given them a vision about coming home and opening a coffee shop that would be safe for young people, but would also change lives. They were confident that this was the next thing God was calling them to do. We were meeting as a church in an old 100-year-old monastery. That is a story for another time.

When they came home, they continued praying about this vision and knew God was leading them to set up a coffee shop in the church/monastery. They named the shop Coffee @ 9:23 after Luke 9:23 ESV - “And He said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.”

They had lived this verse as newlyweds moving to a thirdworld country and serving on the mission field for over a year. They continued in faith as they felt God say they had completed the work He had asked them to do, and now He had a new work for them at home. It was hard for them to leave as God had given them a love for this country and they had fallen in love with the people. But they were being obedient to His call on their lives.

Once home, they worked tirelessly on this new project, Coffee @ 9:23. It was such a cute, warm, and inviting place. For months they would get up at 5 am, open the coffee shop, and wait. They would get one or two customers besides their family who showed up faithfully to support them. They did not lose heart as they believed this was their calling. They would persevere and not give up.

One day the city showed up and told them they had to close the little coffee shop. They were heartbroken, as we all were, because we all believed God had called them to this. It was hard to understand why it was not working out.

How many times do we think we know God has called us to something and it doesn’t seem to happen or work out the way we thought it would? We question whether or not we really heard Him. But we must always trust Him, even when we don’t understand.

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him, and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5-6 NIV

The coffee shop was closed, but God continued to stir their hearts. In the waiting, they did research and learned about coffee. They even had my husband build a coffee cart that they thought they could use for events or weddings, but still nothing.

They never used the coffee cart for the dream God had given them. Time passed, and nothing ever came of the coffee shop or the coffee cart. They moved on and God used them in some other amazing ways, but not coffee, even though it was still buried deep in all our hearts.

“The testing of your faith produces perseverance.” James 1:3b NIV

Fast-forward to 2015. I had been invited to be the keynote speaker at Palm Beach Atlantic University in Florida for their Justice Week. It was a 4-day speaking engagement, and on the last day, the Global Missions Director, Mark, called me and said he felt like he needed to take me to a local coffee shop in the morning before I spoke.

This was hard; speaking is not natural for me. I was nervous and spent an hour or so in prayer to prepare. I needed God’s strength, God’s words, and not my own. Word was getting out, and there was standing room only in the chapel where I was speaking. Students wanted to hear my God story, and everyone was talking about it. This made me even more nervous since this was my first big speaking engagement.

I reluctantly agreed to skip my prayer time and go. I felt like maybe God had something for me, and it meant I would have to trust him even more. Trust! So hard at times. Especially for me. God and I are constantly having conversations about this. He knows He must push me out of my comfort zone often, of course for my own good, even though at times I do not see it that way.

The next morning, Mark, my daughter, a friend of mine, and I went to the coffee shop. It was about thirty minutes away in a town called Lake Worth. Mark was going to introduce us to one of the owners, Pastor Mike.

As soon as I walked through the door, I felt the Holy Spirit say, “This is what I want you to do.” My friend had gone to the restroom, and as I was letting that sink in, my daughter, Katrina, walked up to me and said, “Mom, I think God wants us to do this.” I was looking at her with a shocked look on my face. She was saying what I was hearing from God. My friend walked up and said, “I don’t know what you both are talking about, but I feel like God is saying we are supposed to do something like this.” Wow, wow! God was talking for sure, but now what?

We had coffee and were quiet about what had happened. I didn’t get to meet Pastor Mike that time, but at a later date we did, and we are now friends with him and his beautiful wife, Kelly.

My husband, Carl, was coming that same day to hear me speak. The speaking engagement went incredibly well, and I had many young girls come forward in need of prayer from past abuse, rape, or other painful situations. God had shown me that He was going to use me in a big way. I had no idea then what that even looked like. Boy, did He have a plan.

You see, God had told me in a dream in 2009 that He would use my testimony of what had happened to me for good, and I was just beginning to see a glimpse of what was to come.

After I finished speaking and praying that day, I told Carl I wanted him to come with me to the coffee shop. We didn’t tell him anything about what had happened earlier. As we walked into the coffee shop, he started walking around looking at everything. Then he came over to me and said, “I think God wants us to do something like this.”

Oh my goodness! This was super exciting and scary at the same time. We didn’t know the hows or whats, but we did know that there was not a doubt in any of our minds that we were supposed to open a coffee shop.

God had clearly spoken. We could either listen and be obedient, or ignore God and move on from this experience. Well, obviously, you know what we did.

When you think about it, God was bringing our family all the way back to coffee. But He was not only going to fulfill the vision He had given to my daughter and sonin-love, but He was also going to bring the dream that He had given me to reality.

“Being confident of this, that He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.” Philippians 1:6 NIV

God is truly amazing.

Now you will have to wait to hear the rest of the story in Part Two.