Tonight we had a family dinner. It came as a surprise considering it was squeezed between an after school soccer game and a late night soccer practice under the lights of a high school football field.
As we all took our places at the table for the gift of a half hour together, a fierce wave of gratefulness washed over me. Sad to say, family time at our house has become a battle. The fight focuses on finding time to just be together. The older kids are off to this sport or that activity or to work. Sometimes, I think they just plain want to escape their younger brothers, the wild bunch, so they don’t come home as often.
Wistfully, I look back on the days when family time presented no problem. Practicing the art of being a family was relatively easy before our older kids entered their teens. Nobody had their own car then. Two family cars graced our driveway, an old army green minivan Scott drove and a maroon Expedition we fondly called the Molly Mobile. Usually we all piled into the Molly Mobile to hit the road, often beginning our journey with a prayer and an outcry over a little brother’s stinky feet.
Today, there are five cars in front of our garage, at least whenever everyone is home, which isn’t as often as I would like. Two of the cars smell like powder puffs: our daughters grease their wheels with air-freshener and no brothers with unwashed tooties are allowed in their vehicles.
More evenings than I care for now we eat out of a crock pot in shifts. Recently, two-and-a-half-year-old Garry tossed the big glass lid of the crock pot onto the tile floor and it shattered into a billion pieces. Now I use tinfoil to cover the pot. It makes me hate that old pot all the more. Between athletics and jobs and church activities, it’s become a real challenge for us all to sit down at the dinner table together. My preference is a full blown meal with every chair warmed by a child’s toosh, but some of these tooshes are now bigger than mine and they’ve got places to go and people to see. I find myself grieving that “family” is becoming an endangered species, not just in our home if we don’t make some adjustments, but in homes across America.
It’s plain and simple: the biggest enemy of the family is right outside the front door. In our household of eight people everyone has their outside agendas, and they’re overwhelming. The pressure to sign your life away to a sport, or a job, or a club, or even church is a black hole that sucks families into oblivion.
These days as I fight to hold our family together, my grandparents and their warm, cozy kitchen come to mind. Grandma had a secret weapon in keeping her family together: morning, noon, and night she cooked a delicious sit down meal and family members showed up more often than not to sit at her table.
By the time I was in high school, I would drive to my grandparents’ house for lunch, though it wasn’t a quick trip for me. Even Taco Bell couldn’t beat out my German Grandmother’s food, but more than that, sitting down at my grandparents’ table filled something inherently hungry in my heart, especially since my parents’ table was suffering a dry spell in those years. My brother was in college at the time, and Mom and Dad, in the chomping jaws of middle age, had thrown themselves into their careers.
Grandma’s table was a different story. Not only could I eat delicious food at their peach farm, my grandparents always ate with me, asking how I was doing, laughing and talking with me for as long as I wanted, and so genuinely happy to have me there. I haven’t forgotten that “dinner table lesson” I learned from Grams and Pops.
So I’ve begun to employee this valuable lesson: cook and they will come… prayer and laughter and gratefulness around the table help too.
I’m also finding it effective to get the recipe book out in the morning and begin baking before the older kids leave for the day.
“Is that pumpkin pie for tonight?” they will ask, grabbing their gear to head out the door.
“Yes, and I have Cool Whip too. But don’t you have soccer and youth group tonight?”
“Sure, but I’ll be here for dinner,” they usually say when I bake something sweet in the morning.
It takes time and effort to make a dinner table worth coming home to, but what’s the value of your family to you? What’s your family’s value to God?
Jesus knew the lesson of the dinner table. In fact, Jesus chose the dinner table as his last act of love shown to his disciples before he went to the cross to save them.