Scraps of table fellowship

Exhibit A: My compost pile from the weekend.  

The asparagus stems from an impromptu salmon dinner with two lovely ladies. The "skin" of garlic used to make pesto and the lemon from a roasted chicken that went in a pasta salad shared in the botanical gardens with a dear friend who is moving away for a new season of life. Fruit rinds and stems from my Sunday morning porch breakfast and prayer time.

With spring sprung, there are more hours in my days, more light in my life, more playing in the sunshine, more sharing life in community around me. Life is in full bloom. Its fullness has me constantly reflecting on the good gifts that come from the father of heavenly lights. Especially table fellowship.

It's over the table that strangers become friends, friends become family, and family become friends: Breakfast with a roommate on a busy morning.  Dinners with friends where you don't get up to clear your plates until hours later. Mid-workday delight life-catchup lunch sessions. Communion around the table and sharing Jesus in "backyard church" following an amazingly fresh salad buffet. Breakfast or dinner dates laced with intentional conversation about how God is at work in our lives. Meeting new people over dessert porch sitting. Relishing life lived together as we entertain our taste buds and fill our stomachs.

As I have been reading through Lenten devotions on Matthew written by people from my church, I have been struck by how Jesus valued our fellowship over a meal and ultimately the meal of bread and wine, body and blood. It's funny how truths from childhood songs seep back in my life as an adult with new meaning: He sets me at his banqueting table, His banner over me is love.

Cheers to life in this season of spring and sunshine, of table fellowship, and of learning to root all these things in that banqueting table.