There is something powerful about sharing meals. I’ve heard
that said many times. In all the best books about community and hospitality and
relational ministry they mention sharing meals, breaking bread, family dinners.
I always want for more to be said, so I guess that means I need to say it. The
best way I know how is to tell a few stories first.
The Bubble
High school was really a pretty amazing time for me. I’d
been in the same school since kindergarten, known the same people my whole
life. My best friend and I had been such since the second grade. I’d weathered
teenage angst, maybe a little more sharply than some, and come out the other
side it seemed, by the time I came to senior year. I didn’t expect for much to
change. I’d go to the same sorts of parties and we’d tell the same jokes we’d
been telling since the seventh grade and we would graduate in the spring just
slightly more mature versions of ourselves. Then on the first day of our senior
year, a girl I was moderately good friends with decided that she and I and a
third friend were going to sit at a table essentially populated by boys. Now,
the strangeness of this was determined by factors of high school social
politics that would take a long time to explain, and would bore you very much,
so suffice to say it was a bold move. The three of us sat down at their lunch
table without announcement, and suddenly, the third friend and I became part of
their circle. We ate lunch with them, sat on their couch in study hall, joined
their section of chairs in the classroom, and were assumed members of group
projects. (For more high school typical reasons, the first friend was less
automatically embraced, and socially ended the school year in a very different
place than she began.)
This meal time change altered the whole course of my year.
Lunch hour with what we affectionately dubbed “the bubble” was mostly a highly
energetic affair. Most keenly I remember heated debates on the meaning of 'metrosexual’,
paintings done in ranch dressing on paper plates, dissected pizza slices,
towers of trash on red plastic trays, deciding to cook a whole pound of bacon
in the communal microwave, and much eye rolling at each other’s general
ridiculousness. From lunch came other meals. After school stops at Taco Bell
with one friend became common. When one friend’s parents were away, I and one
other went over to make pancakes and watch cartoons. After a party, holing up
in a McDonalds, eating terrible fries, and trying to write a presentation. A
particularly special evening we spent way too long figuring out how to split
the cost of a pizza after a late night working on our most epic final project.
Graduation came, and things changed, as they should. I
looked back on that last year and nothing was the same as it was going to be.
Briefly we all had the feeling that some night soon would be the last we saw of
each other. But that night never came. We saw each other every few months
instead of every day. Meals became drawn out affairs, lasting hours, into the
early morning most times. The numbers vary, sometimes two or three, often six,
only once all nine of us sit together and share a meal. Coming up on four years
later – ages in the life of school friends at our stage of life – we’re making
plans for our Thanksgiving reunion, per usual.
These most unexpected friends taught me more about
friendship than I think even they know. At one point I looked across the table
at IHOP and thought, “If they met me now, without this history, would they
still be part of my life? Would I be part of theirs?” I’ve learned how to talk
about faith differently. We are all growing in this, but it is one of the most
profoundly amazing things I have been a part of in my short life. We grew in
different ways, different directions, different courses, different goals.
Despite being the same age together, we are in vastly different places in life –
school, jobs, relationships, and faith look so different in each life. But we
sit down to meals together and in the course of our burgers or pancakes we reach
the point of honesty. I think it’s in those moments we realize more than ever
how little we know. These friends teach me more about life than I could have
imagined. Just by being and allowing me to be with them, they force me to think
differently about career and education and marriage and God and the world.
Ministry Lunch
My freshman year of college was a very weird time for me. As
previously mentioned, I’d been in the same school my whole life. I’d never had to
make friends from scratch before, there was always history, or the new friend
was encountering me in my comfort zones of school and church. Pick that girl up
and set her down on a college campus and internal chaos ensues. I had no idea
how people made friends.
Thank God for whoever it was that decided a random
assortment of people from our Foundations of Christian Ministry class should
eat lunch together after class twice a week. I was outrageously uncomfortable,
but so pleased that someone wanted me around. That particular group of
classmates wasn’t consistent, and after the class ended, so did lunch
gatherings. But one particularly persistent friend was intent on ‘getting the
gang back together’ in our second semester. It happened once or twice that spring.
Oddly enough, the fall of our sophomore year, a segment of that original lunch
group was rounded up again, by our persistent friend if I remember correctly.
There were five of us now, myself the only girl, all ministry majors. The bond
between us was quick and strong, for reasons that none of us are quite sure of
even today. We all have theories, but no real answers. We developed an odd
familial dynamic, complete with parental roles and birth order. Suddenly, I was
Mom. We ate lunch as a family twice a week, plus dinners randomly in different combinations.
We had movie nights and one very strange trip for ice cream an hour away. Then
we adopted a freshman worship major, and our family grew. It’s hard for me to
explain the weirdness and the beauty and the joy of it without sounding like a
nutjob.
Sophomore year of college was probably the hardest year of
my short life. But becoming family with those boys was one of the two things
that God gave me to get me through it. (The other being another beautiful group
of friends, but that is a story for another essay.) Telling them about the fear
and the breakdowns and the hard choices I was making gave me strength. When the
toxic relationship that was the nucleus of so many of my issues finally broke,
they were there to force me back into life. When I got strings of painful
texts, they were there to remind me how ridiculous his accusations were, and in
one case someone stepped in to put a stop to it. Over the course of the last two
and a half years, they have come to me for counsel and let me cry on their
shoulders. Our friendships have been tested in so many ways, some unique to us,
but just as many simply the growing pains of early adulthood. Not all of it was
idyllic. A lot of it was hard. Some days I wanted to punch them. Others I had to fight the protective instinct
to punch someone who hurt them. I cried over broken relationships and
destructive behaviors in all of their lives. In a stage of life when romantic
relationships suddenly held so much more weight, we learned how to have healthy
male/female friendships – through a whole hell of a lot of trial and error. I
got to rejoice in their triumphs and cry tears of joy when they overcame the
hurdles life had set in front of them. Sometimes we disagreed so deeply that I
questioned if we were going to stay friends. Sometimes individual friendships
were really unhealthy.
But now as we teeter on the brink of “real” adulthood –
graduation, marriage, ministry, even more education – I don’t question the
place they hold in my life. I know it will change. If it didn’t, we would have
a problem. We won’t have twice-weekly lunch or family movie nights. But these
six months of PRIME have shown me that we can still have intense theological
discussions and heart-warming, healing, late night chats. There’s even a chance
we’ve accidentally provided future children with a whole host of extra aunts
and uncles.
All of this:
growth, love, depth, reflection of the Gospel – because someone
invited me to lunch. Both times, unexpected. Both times, initially unremarkable. But two and three and four years
later, the people I ate regular meals with became irreplaceable.
Here’s my theory, in
two parts:
Practically, there is something to be said about the
function food can play. When you sit down to a meal together, you have to stop
talking for a few minutes. Putting food in front you means that while you eat,
someone else gets a chance to talk. It gives you a starting point – if you have
nothing else to say, talk about food! Meals, done well, are a time for rest. It’s
a moment to stand still, take a breath. Asking another person to join in that
rest holds a degree of intimacy. This, I propose, is part of why we feel so
affronted when someone we don’t know well asks to join us at an empty lunch
table.
More importantly, there’s a reason Christ gave us a
meal to remember him by, and told us to practice it regularly. Sharing food,
stopping your day to connect with another person, nourishing your body and your
soul in the same moment, these things are powerful. Don’t hear me saying that
lunch with my friends is the same as a sacrament, but I am saying it is
something more than just food. Communal meals are a sign of the life to come,
the celebration of real community that we call “the marriage supper of the
Lamb.”
A special word of encouragement to all my friends still in
undergrad – pick one lunch a week, pick one person or group, and make it a
habit, just for a semester. I promise, it will impact you. Particularly my HU
friends – you’re already stopping at the hub or the DC after class. If you don’t
have back to backs, why not take that hour to invest in a friend. Sacrifice
your nap once a week, take a long lunch, and see what happens.
We can achieve something powerful if we choose to see our
meal times as so much more than just a moment to pack some nutrients into our
bodies. They are incredible opportunities to invest in other humans, and to be
invested in. It refreshes you – yes, even us introverts – to connect, soul to
soul, with another person. This, my stories above, is what we miss when we work
through lunch every day, when we spend half of our lunch break on our phones,
when we hit the drive through on our commute instead of sitting down with our
families. We miss out on glimpses of eternity.
So take a lunch break.
