This past Sunday, while preparing supper, I stabbed myself with a piece of bamboo. Not in the kitchen, out in the driveway on my way to collect tomatoes from the garden. It was a freak accident. The boys had left a bamboo lance in the road and someone ran it over, shattering the long piece of bamboo. Company was coming for Sunday dinner and I wanted everything to look nice, including the driveway. So I picked up the shredded bamboo lance and tried to toss it into our burn pile, but as I threw the bamboo, somehow a shard of bamboo pierced the top of my hand and embedded all the way through to my palm.

Dang, did it hurt!

At first I didn’t realize how injured I was because the bamboo had broken off inside of my hand. I headed for the garden to get the tomatoes, but was in too much pain to pick a tomato with my right hand. The hand I always use. The hand I had injured. So I inspected my bleeding wound. That’s when I realized, gosh, I might need to go to Urgent Care. Company was coming in less than an hour, but I needed a doctor to remove the bamboo that had pierced my hand. It was poking out of my palm, but hadn’t broken through the skin there.

When I showed Scott my injury, he said, “How do you do these weird things to yourself?” He was looking at me like, “Really? You did this to yourself? Kind of like burning your eyeball while making potato salad. Now you’ve impaled your hand while picking tomatoes?

I spent three hours at Urgent Care by myself. Plenty of time to think about why Sunday dinner is so important to me. My family was at home having dinner with our company without me. Tears filled my eyes. How could I miss this dinner with Lacy’s boyfriend’s family? We’d be meeting Jake’s parents and brothers for the first time around our table. A sacred moment that I was missing. I sat there and cried at Urgent Care not because I was in pain, which I was, but because I was missing dinner.

I come from a long line of Sunday dinners. You probably do too, even if you don’t realize it, even if your family never eats Sunday dinner together anymore. Fifty years ago, families gathered around the table on a regular basis, especially on Sundays. A hundred years ago, the table was like our television screens today. Everyone clustered around the table, sharing news and entertainment, stories and history, families nourished not only by food, but by love and affection and perhaps some feisty family arguments.

Wouldn’t you agree that sitting at the table with your family is far better than watching television together? If you wouldn’t agree with this, I highly recommend getting rid of your television. We did that twelve years ago, okay, we still have a television, but it only plays video games and movies now and I still think that’s too much. I hate the video games. But a dozen years ago, getting off television was like giving up crack cocaine. Scott and I agreed to do it together, but a month later, I was begging my husband to reconsider. “How will I learn to cook great meals for you without the cooking channel?” I argued, but Scott wasn’t budging. “Use your cookbooks like you did when we lived in Germany,” he said.

Thank God, Scott didn’t budge. Giving up television is one of the best things our family has ever done. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes family dinners dissolve into feisty family arguments, but not that often. Most of the time our family dinners are a load of fun.

My grandparents could really argue at the table, but their kitchen was a sanctuary for family, a place of love and laughter and deep bonding. A number of times I remember my grandma taking food off my grandpa’s plate to give to us grandkids when the supply ran short on the table, hence my grandparents’ feisty arguments. Pops loved his food and could growl like a dog when someone got near his plate, but Grandma wasn’t afraid of him. Their kitchen was small and cozy and warm, their white Formica table tucked into a corner against a wall and a window. You could look out the kitchen window at their peach orchard.

Before dawn, the lights came on in my grandparents’ kitchen. Grandma fixed three home-cooked meals a day at the same time every day. If you showed up at meal times, which were always right on time, there was room for you at their table. When I was in high school, instead of driving to Long John Silvers or McDonalds with friends for lunch, I often drove to my grandparent’s house. Not only would I be fed, I would be loved there. My grandma was the daughter of German immigrants, her food was rich and hearty, prepared by loving hands. I don’t ever remember Grandma saying she loved me, but I knew she loved me, and feeding me was her thing. She’d make pickled carrots just for me. Homemade soup on Mondays was also my favorite. Any left overs from the weekend went into Grandma’s Monday soup.

When I got married, I spent some time watching Grandma make her Monday soup, often left over spaghetti was involved. Our family now loves my left over spaghetti soup, which is really a lesser version of Grandma’s Monday soup. Sometimes I fix it on Mondays, but usually it’s our Wednesday meal because it’s perfect for the crock pot before we load up for Wednesday nights at church for youth group.

And nobody messes with our Sunday dinners. Everyone in our family guards that day, even our grown kids still fight to come. It’s the one day of the week I now get to see Luke. He drives home from college to eat with us and get his laundry done by yours truly. And I love it!

So last Sunday, I sat in urgent care longing to do Luke’s laundry. Longing to have my apron on in the kitchen. Longing to meet Jake’s precious family. And I missed it. All of it. Okay, not all of it. I got home with a bandaged hand just in time to say hello and goodbye to Jake’s people. The food had been eaten. The football game in the front yard had been played. Our two families had bonded, laughter filled my ears when I walked into the house feeling like I was about to cry.

God, what is your purpose in me missing family dinner? Would I have said something stupid to Jake’s parents like, “Can we just do things the old-fashioned way and draw up the betrothal agreement now between our kids?” Why didn’t I get to be a part of this special dinner? I never miss Sunday dinner, now I’ve missed an extra special Sunday dinner and I’m really sad about it.

After praying, I came to the conclusion, I needed to blog this week about the importance of our table and yours. Sitting down with your family beyond just Thanksgiving and Christmas should be done. And done a lot. I love our kitchen table. It was made in Mexico out of soft wood. You can read the boys’ numbers and letters embedded in the table from doing their homework there. The table is stained by red cake frosting and water that wasn’t wiped up fast enough. Half our dining chairs are old, really old, and half the chairs are new, but look kind of old. We could only afford four new chairs this summer out of our harvest money. They’re leather chairs that hopefully will last a lifetime. Our table seats eight, but we usually fit twelve to fifteen people around our table using our folding chairs.

When we first got the new chairs, the boys got in a fight about who would sit in them so Scott pulled the leather chairs away from the table and made the boys sit in our cold, metal folding chairs during that meal. The funny thing was, once the storm passed of the boys fighting over the chairs, our meal went merrily along as it usually does. Plenty of talk at the table about our day and a game of Bible or history trivia led by Scott after the boys finished eating. Those cheap folding chairs didn’t stop our love and laughter at the table, they didn’t change our meal at all. So if you don’t have a great table in your kitchen or dining room, that is no excuse not to sit down with your family anyway. You–your family– this is the most important ingredient, not the table or the chairs or even the food.

My grandparents’ chairs weren’t expensive. Neither was their kitchen table. I can still see every part of that kitchen. The old white stove Grandma had to light before baking in it when I was a little girl. The new stove I didn’t like near as much that finally replaced that old white stove when Grandma got old and her hands curled up with arthritis and she couldn’t light her stove any longer. The refrigerator that never held a lot, but still Grandma fixed amazing meals from their garden and the basement cellar supplies. Canning peaches in that kitchen with my mom and grandma. Washing dishes with my cousins. Crying at the kitchen table when Pops died and Grandma was left alone.

My Pops and Grams have been gone twenty years, but what I learned at their table never gets old. We told the truth at my grandparents’ table. We respected each other at their table. We even respected presidential candidates we didn’t like at their table. We laughed a lot at my grandparents’ table. Eating a meal together wan’t just about the food, a supernatural bonding took place at that table. Later this bonding continued at my parents’ table on Sundays at the ranch, and now we often do Sunday dinners at our house so we can play football in the yard after dinner.

Of course a supernatural bonding happens when families sit down at a table together. After all, the table was God’s idea in the first place. Jesus could have done anything the night before he died. That he chose to call those he loved to the table for a last supper speaks volumes.

If you want to strengthen your family start having Sunday dinners together. Turn off the television. Turn off your cell phones. Turn off all your problems and distractions for a short while and turn to each other at the kitchen table. Look into each others’ eyes. Say a prayer together. Tell stories around your table. Family stories that bond you together. Our family often repeats the same old family stories over and over again. Especially when someone new joins us on a Sunday evening. Oh, how I wish I’d been here for last Sunday’s dinner! Six new people to hear all our old family stories. And the chance to hear another’s family’s funny, fantastic stories we’ve never heard before.

If you don’t have a family of your own, build one. Gather the people you care about around you on a Sunday afternoon. Feed them. Laugh with them. Love them. And tell them lots of stories around the table…

Now go tell your own stories around your own kitchen table. God bless your table and you, my friend.