Lavish Hospitality 25

posted in: 31days, lavish hospitality | 0

Would you like to hear a heart desire of mine?  Really?

I’ve wanted a place (a home, which we have) to have a meal with people each week.  Preferably the same people because I love deep community, but a place to sit down over food and good conversation, good drink and lovely people – a place for people to be real, for kids to play in the yard, for time to slowly pass because you are enjoying the company so much.

A place to share happiness and hurts, celebrations and pain.  A place where you can come dressed up or in cut-offs and flipflops.  And for this to be longterm.

I didn’t have this growing up – even though we lived in the same house and went to the same church most of my growing up years.  We sorta had it with the small church I grew up in with 5th Sunday dinners, but that was at a church and only happened a few times a year. Though there was some seriously good food.

But, I want it around our table.  And if I had my way, I would pick about 10 couples to all move to my neighborhood and do this with me every week.

Quote from Sally Clarkson’s The Life Giving Table.  Originally in Orthodoxy

 

Lavish 12

posted in: 31days, food, lavish hospitality | 1

On a post about food, and it is my son’s birthday, and I’m not cooking anything.  Nope.  We are going out for donuts, then going to a fun lunch, picking up his Publix birthday cake, then going to a friends for small group.  I’m getting off easy.

But, sitting around a table is more than just food.  Yes, I love to cook.  One of the ways I learned to cook was from my mom being disabled and unable to much of my growing up.  So, she would tell me what to do and I would cook it. Or I learned it from watching my Granny and Papa or learning how to scale fish and cook a mean french fry at the Suwannee River with weeks away with my Papa.

But, I learned to love to cook for others when I got to know a family in college.  I got to be a part of their celebratory meals and their every day meals.  Knowing recipes that family members loved.  Knowing what would please the ones they loved.  Sitting down at a table in their home and talking for house over good food and good wine.  Or just good old sweet tea.

The meal is more than just food.  It is life for the soul of many.

Quote from The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaeffer.