Compelled by Love

by: Ashley Dease

Each month I write for this blog, I try to keep the theme in line with the season or holiday of that month. February being the season of love, I want to touch on the idea of love and why it’s still important to let love be our guiding force in life. This may seem like an unrelated topic for a coffee roasting blog, but Dignity Roasters wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the love of our neighbors (and coffee) pushing us to provide work force training to distressed folks.

When Dignity Roasters opened 9 years ago, the idea was simple: provide work and food handling certifications to those in need to earn what they need. As an initiative of Wear Gloves, we became an avenue of empowering the underserved to overcome generational trauma, break cycles of dependency, and rewrite their narratives with dignity. Love is what compelled Wear Gloves to see the need in Ocala, and open up Dignity Roasters as a response.

And there you have the key to the matter: love is clarity in seeing. It strips us of our ego and lets us see each other with unclouded eyes, realizing that the only difference between us are the circumstances and experiences that led us to where we are. Love dissolves those boundaries that divide and shows us that we need each other, compelling us to work for a common good.

And here we are, 9 years later, still fulfilling that initial purpose, but what we are finding is that our love for coffee is also a compelling force in our lives: to provide Ocala with the best specialty coffee we can roast. Now, this love for coffee isn’t as deep or profound as our love for God and others, but it’s no less important to follow that clarity of love even into the small things in life. It’s a “stop and smell the roses” type of ethic that keeps us focused on making our coffee consistently enjoyable to our subscribers.

Recently, I found out that when coffee was first discovered, it was roasted, brewed, and consumed for the purpose of aiding in daily prayers. This initial purpose of coffee has remained to this day, providing millions of people around the world with the energy to wake up to what is important in life. Keeping this in mind, we are blessed to know that our coffee is also fulfilling this ancient purpose by providing energy to local churchgoers though our many commercial subscriptions! From the coffee farms in Central and South America to Ocala, Florida, Love invites us to be present and to see what God sees: a plentiful harvest. All we have to do is “Wear Gloves” and take part in this supply chain of love.