Prayer for the Kitchen Table

We had the kind of week that a lot of people have all the time. Over-scheduled, we have zipped from one place to the next. We have eaten dinner in the car. We drove from Tai Kwon Do to a cello concert last night while Max changed clothes in the backseat. We ate dinner in shifts, scurrying around each other as we took turns at the table.

For the three of us, this week was a perfect storm of really important things that couldn't be missed or rescheduled all crash landing on our calendar at the same time.

What it cost us was our family dinner hour. I will always wonder what little bits of story we missed because we didn't get to hear each other's highs and lows, or funny happenings of the day. Of course, we talked while we were running hither and yon but without the structure of and now we sit down at the table and look at each other's faces and tell our stories, I know that there are things that didn't get shared, that slipped through the cracks because I always remember better at the table and so I get to share the smaller things: the word I looked up in the dictionary and the strange words that surrounded it, the sweet old man in the produce aisle, the murder of crows that had lunch in the backyard.

So we were happy to see Friday roll around and get ourselves back to the table. We spent the weekend around it, telling stories about violins and Minecraft texture packs, making a list of things we want to do over Spring Break. We appreciated it more for having missed it all week.