life around the table

One of my goals for this year was to have people over to my home more.  To open up my heart and my home.  To serve people and welcome people and invite people into my life.  I want my home to be a place that is warm and inviting.  I want it to be a place where people feel welcome and safe and rested.  My word for 2014 is CELEBRATE.  I want to feast and celebrate the everyday and the ordinary.  To take time to connect.  To look people in the eye and talk about things that matter over good food and good drinks.  This kind of life happens around the table.

I want my table to be open to all.  Whether it's frozen pizza and beer or Thai takeout or fancy dinner parties with carefully planned out courses and paired wines.  The table is a sacred place.  Food is a connecting point.  We bring dinner to families as they mourn the loss of a dear family member.  We celebrate new babies with casseroles and cakes.  We get to know new friends over appetizers and wine.  We celebrate with family with tradition over holidays at the table.  Smells and certain flavors and special dishes take us back to precise moments in our childhoods.  Mothers-in-law share secret recipes handed down for years with their daughters-in-law.  Food is the language of love and the language of life.  The table is sacred.  Not just a wooden table and chairs with drinks and meals and glasses and silverware.  A table is much more than that.  The table is a place where people come together to live in community...to share in joys and sorrows...to pass on traditions... to be fed and nurtured in more ways than one.

So much of life happens around the table.  At least the parts of life that are worth living.  We gather and we laugh and we give thanks.  We feast and we celebrate and we raise our glasses to toast.

The idea of community and of feasting and life lived fully around the table has been on my mind lately.  It began slowly about a year ago, and I don't really know where it came from.  I started to think abut life and sharing it with others.  Those who are like us and those who are very different.  I began to crave community and deep relationship with others and to see how strongly that was related to life around the table.  It became one of my new year's goals (notice I didn't say resolutions...I gave them up this year).  It grew with ideas presented to me during if:gathering and the meeting of my first if:table.  It has continued to develop as I read Bread and Wine by Shana Niequist.  I have many more thoughts on this topic and hope to share them in the future as I continue to learn and be stretched in this area of my life.

Here's to many more days of celebrations and life lived around the table.  In what ways are you enjoying life around the table these days?