Easter, Birthday, and a Family Story

I love my family a lot, but my family is CRAZY. What I've recently learned ... and what I would never believe growing up ... is that everybody else's families are CRAZY too. Some even crazier than mine. Which is saying something. Price and I decided to have Easter lunch with my family this year, which we combined into a birthday celebration for my daddy. I love my daddy. He is my favorite person ever. He is the only person I would spend hours looking for an iPhone-case-with-a-belt-loop-that-will-still-hold-his-otterbox-cased-phone, just in case the OTTERBOX isn't enough. Have you seen an Otterbox?

But I love my daddy. Here we are on wedding day:

Anyway, so what does this have to do with food and God? Specific blog topic = hopefully not just rambles. (Though there will absolutely be the occasional post about our slow cat Puff. She's slow. REALLY slow. In the brain. But I love her so much!)

Food was never really important to my family growing up. We ate and we ate well ... but it could come out of a box or a bag and it was fine. But what was important was eating as a family. We ate dinner together every night, and I can't thank my parents enough for that institution.

For an hour each night, we would gather. We would pray. We would talk, listen, laugh, fight, sometimes cry. But it was always together, and it was always over dinner. Before and after dinner, we would go our separate ways. But dinnertime was sacred.

There are lots of statistics that show that kids that eat dinner with their parents every night are healthier, happier, and they do better in school. For me, the impact is spiritual as well. I feel like God smiles when we eat together ... Jesus loved to eat with other people and to thank God for the blessing of food. Doing that as a family, night after night, cemented in me a deep appreciation for family time, for shared meals, for breaking bread together. Nothing is sweeter than that.

Price and I love eating with our families. We try to eat with my parents as often as we can, and though his parents live in Alabama, we try to have his brother and sister over for dinner once a week or so, just for family time. And those dinners ... with my family or his ... tend to last much longer than they should. There is laughing, talking, listening, fighting. Everything I remember from childhood dinners, and everything I want for our own kids.