It’s the same everyday: three meals planned, purchased, prepared, placed, and picked up. Whose idea was it that humans need to eat three times a day? Including weekends!
My children are always so hungry, but they also have endless ways of disrupting a good meal. And, with seven people around the table, there’s rarely a meal that pleases everyone at the same time.
“Ugh…we’re having THAT!?”
“Can I eat outside in the treehouse?”
“I don’t like this!”
“How many more bites do I have to eat?”
“How come fill-in-the-blank got more fill-in-the-blank than me?”
“Oops! I dropped my fill-in-the-blank-food-I-don’t-like on the floor.” (How conveeeeeeenient.)
“She’s too close to me!” “He’s touching me!”
“I said ‘Please pass the butter'”
“Yes, dear pickiest child eater, you simply must eat something today.”
The excuses, problems, complaints, and opinions are constant, consistent, and seemingly have no end.
We work hard on basic gratitude, table manners, self-sacrifice and other worthy things around here, but man! Something about the table has a way of brining it all out…at once.
All I want is for us to all gather together, to enjoy a good meal and good conversation, to delight in each other. We have three chances a day to get it right, but sometimes pleasant meals feel so infrequent and the effort feels so not worth it. As the mom who feels the pressure to feed these troops, and to feed them well, and to feed them something that satisfies them, it can be very tempting to wave the white flag of surrender.
“THAT’S IT!” I say to myself in my head. “I’m DONE! From now on, you all can fend for yourselves. I couldn’t care less what you eat. Live on junk, if you want. Or don’t eat for all I care. We’ll see how long you last without me.”
Bitterness and resentment start to seep in and Ogre Mom threatens to rear her ugly head.
I have a long ways to go in representing well the love and goodness of God to my children.
Because God. How good, how kind, how patient, how lacking any resentment or bitterness does He set the table of His grace for me every day. More than three times, again and again, with great care and attention. And how often do I scoff at it, resist coming and avoid eating, complain about what I’m given, wish for some other portion, and compare myself to others.
God knows that grace from His table will wind up on the floor, wasted. He knows I’ll refuse to eat this part or that part of the meal. And yet, there’s the meal again today, again the next moment even. Lovingly prepared without any need for credit or any complaint of inconvenience.
And all I’m doing is frying up some eggs, or baking some bread, or forming some meatballs. His meal is infinitely more valuable, for He feeds us with Himself.
Don’t waste His grace! It is our very life because it’s how He gets His life into us. But, when you do (because we will), come again to His table. The feast is waiting. He’s there too. And he wants to delight in you.
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