The other day as I was fetching something from the basement I noticed something odd, our bamboo placemats were splayed all around the laundry hamper. I quickly figured out that someone from dinner church the previous night had picked up the napkins and the placemats and thrown them all down our laundry chute.
This is the kind of thing that happens when you share your house, even if for just one night a week. Things end up in the wrong places. Stuff breaks. I cannot tell you how many glasses we went through in the first year, until I bought some sturdier ones at Ikea. We haven’t had a break since, but if we did we would tidy it up and continue rolling along, because that is what we do. What actually matters is the work of community. It’s the messiness of sharing life together which is holy and beautiful not the placemats or glasses on the dinner table.
There are boundaries around how we share our home. Folks don’t go up stairs or into the basement. We ask the kids not to climb or jump on the furniture. We put the cats in our bedroom so the people with allergies can breathe. We also vacuum the couch and rug just before dinner to minimize the dander. We make our home open and welcoming to our community and they treat our home like their own place. This means that there is respect on both sides and not a lot of upset when something goes wrong, such as a cat escape!
My favorite times at dinner church are setting up and cleaning up. This is when we’re all in and out of the kitchen, grabbing serving spoons, or rinsing off dishes and loading up the dishwasher. I love the feeling of team work and the sense of intimacy of people rooting around in drawers looking for a ladle. The distances we keep from each other diminish when we’re chatting at the sink or hunting for the perfect bowl to microwave some potatoes.
My second favorite time is when we talk about the ways we can be present to one another in the coming week. That’s where we do the same things we do in the kitchen, but now with our lives. We let the walls come down. We ask for help. We show the brokenness and the mess and the beauty and together we keep rolling along. We couldn’t do that if we hadn’t already done the work of building real relationships in the kitchen.
It’s not always easy to share our home with our community, but it is always worth it. I am incredibly lucky to be able to host my community and to be able to learn and grow with them in this shared space.
-Eilidh
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| Dinner the night the placemats went on an adventure! |
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