By the time you read this, Hal and I will be in Brooklyn, NY, visiting our three adult children, their spouses, and our two grandchildren. We have been visiting them Thanksgiving week every year, and it’s such a happy week for us! We get to spend time together, singing Thanksgiving hymns with harmony. We get to spend time reading to the grandkids, playing games together, taking walks in the brisk and chilly air of Brooklyn parks and playgrounds. We schlep around like real New Yorkers, dragging our groceries home on foot as they do. We have learned to cook Thanksgiving dinner in my daughter’s kitchen with food that works with pescatarian and celiac diets as well as many classic Thanksgiving dishes. There is a delicious new pie shop near James and Emily’s apartment that I am already leaning toward for dessert. I do have to remember that the most important thing is NOT the food but the thankfulness. We will invite friends from Japan and China, along with their new baby, to share the meal with us. We will share life with each other, which is all the more precious and special after this pandemic deprivation. We will share joys and worries, future plans and anxieties, prayer requests and concerns. And we will be together.
As the church began, new believers started spending time living together. Over all their togetherness, they sensed that God was beyond them, making wonders happen. They shared whatever they had with each other, and they looked out for needs they could fill in the lives of one another. They came together to worship God and to pray, and they broke bread and ate joyfully together, sharing meals and conversation. Because of the way they lived together, others noticed and gravitated to this new way of believing and living, and many were saved.
Could it be that every time believers come together around a table to share a meal that there is something of the Lord’s Table there with them? Could it be that the Lord can come and bless our tables with the love and joy of the early church? As Rich says at the end of his benediction each week, “May it be so!”