LTN Advent Calendar 2021: Peace and Coffee Talk

Each week, as we make our way through this Advent season, LTN Writers will provide short nerdy devotionals for you and your family to enjoy. You can find them all here. Also, if you want more nerdy advent content, check out our Advent Calendar from 2018. Our next Advent devotional discusses peace as seen in Toge Productions’ Coffee Talk.

This week of peace in Advent can be a difficult one to sit in if you don’t know how to define peace. The peace that the world offers is so fleeting, dependent on how you feel on a particular day or the circumstance that you may find yourself in. We are left to determine what peace looks like for our own lives, and that can cause friction depending on how different our opinions on peace are from one another. Despite all this, peace is something humanity as a whole desperately longs for and has been longing for throughout all of history. We seek it even when we don’t really know how to define it or where to find it, and when we find some semblance of what we believe to be peace, we return to it over and over. We find this pattern not only in our own lives but also in the stories we tell, with Coffee Talk being an example.

As you serve the various customers in the eponymous shop Coffee Talk, you learn that they all have situations they are trying to escape from. They have struggles—work crunches and burnout, family tensions and disapprovals, and romantic relationships. By providing a safe space for them, they return again, and gradually you are able to speak advice into their situations. They are encouraged and emboldened to not give in to the turmoil in their lives but to stay steady in spite of it, a peace that they ultimately would not have found on their own. It is only through the intervention of you the player that they are able to be given peace.

Perfect peace ultimately cannot be found on our own, but we are reminded in this season of Advent that peace is available to us all through the birth of Jesus. We are given this promise by the Prince of Peace Himself: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.” (John 14:27). I invite you to not be pulled into the chaos that this season can often bring, but rest in the peace we have been given.