Breaking Bread: Savoring Communion with Others and Christ
This post originally appeared on iBelieve.com here.
It all starts at a table. Maybe it’s your dining room table, maybe it’s a cozy bistro table, maybe it’s a table at a corner booth at your favorite restaurant, maybe even a table at the front of your church sanctuary.
Good things happen at tables. Glasses clink together with cheers to happy things, dishes are passed around from person to person, food is shared, conversation flows. Flavors blend and meld as our stories do the same, fueling both our bodies and our hearts with richness and goodness.
Sitting down at a table to share a meal or a drink with someone doesn’t usually just happen on accident or by surprise. When you sit down to that table, you have opened up time in your day out of the busyness of life to be with someone. You’ve decided they were valuable to you, that the relationship was of worth, and that time was worth spending with them. Sitting across the table from them, sharing food, swapping stories, is opening your life and your heart to them.
There are so many conversations that are best had at a table, with a steaming cup of tea in hand or a big bowl of pasta sitting in front of you or a slice of gooey cake waiting to be devoured. Something about that object, that food, that drink in front of you breaks the ice a little bit. Hard conversations seem easier when there’s something to cut the tension, even something as simple as a meal. Easy conversations seem sweeter when something tangible is enjoyed at the same time.
I think food and drink become little (and delicious) vehicles of trust and truth, gentle wrecking balls breaking down our guards and our walls as they fill up all the cracks in our stomachs and souls.
People relax when there’s food involved, maybe even a little more so if red wine is involved... but people loosen up and breathe a little easier and let more of who they are show. It’s like these things on the table are inviting us to dig in, try new things, taste, savor, celebrate.