Your cart is currently empty!
In today’s episode of the podcast, we discuss the keystone habit of daily family mealtimes. This habit will change the atmosphere of your home and the depth of your family culture. It is the first step and the biggest step you can make towards discipling your children. We’ll talk about the theological truths we learn from daily family meals as well as practical steps to start gathering the people in your household for a meal together.
Links:
- Habits of the Household: Practicing the Story of God in Everyday Family Rhythms by Justin Whitmel Earley
- The Spiritually Vibrant Home: The Power of Messy Prayers, Loud Tables, and Open Doors by Don Everts
- The Life Giving Table: Nurturing Faith through Feasting, One Meal at a Time by Sally Clarkson
- Reclaiming Conversation by Sherry Turkle
***If you have enjoyed visiting A More Beautiful Life Collective, please like, comment, share, and subscribe. Let’s make the world more beautiful together. This post contains affiliate links. If you purchase something through this link, I earn a small commission at no cost to you. It’s a win-win!***
Welcome to A More Beautiful Life Collective. We know that in the hectic hurry of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what matters. This is a moment to pause and realign your focus on the one who gives us peace and rest. We are focusing on discipleship, productivity, and homemaking as we live with eternity in mind. This is the place where you’ll learn to create a life you love and cultivate your heart for God.
Hi everyone! Welcome back to A More Beautiful Life Collective Podcast S1E7. Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you’re listening and leave a five-star rating and review to help other people find this podcast. Also, you can visit the blog to read more God-centered content and to subscribe to monthly newsletters.
Habits to Create a Spiritually Vibrant Home
We’ve been talking about habits on the podcast and focusing on different areas where we can include habits into our lives that can lead to a spiritually vibrant life. Much of our habits have been focused on our individual lives, but as we discussed in the last podcast, our habits don’t occur in a vacuum. Each of our actions impacts someone else. We have to be aware of the impact of our actions and consider how we can create habits that will trigger growth and goodness in the lives of those around us.
Our last podcast discussed why we are all homemakers. It doesn’t matter if you are a man or a woman. You are creating a place to live in your own context. Your goal should be to make a home that reflects the gospel to those around you, pointing them towards God. Your home allows you to give glory to God.
Today, we are going to consider rhythms and routines that your individual home can include as a family unit. These are not necessarily personal spiritual disciplines, though you will see how they are related to some of the habits of spiritual disciplines we’ve talked about earlier in the podcasts. Importantly, these two things work together hand in hand to create a deep and long-lasting relationship with God. We need both communal and individual practices of discipleship, worship, and fellowship. If you find that you prefer one to the other, you may grow to have a lop-sided view of God. Your relationship with him will not be as rich as it could be if you facilitate both in your life.
We are going to be talking about habits you can include in your life today that will lead to a spiritually vibrant home for all those in your household. These habits include a daily common meal, family devotions, tea times, and regular celebrations and traditions. Today, we are focusing on family mealtimes. On the next podcast, we are going to discuss the other habits. These rhythms and routines will help you to create that home that points others to Christ, and they will create a rhythm of remembrance in your family that builds a family culture.
Like I said in the last podcast, everyone can benefit from adding these habits into their life. You don’t have to have a spouse and 2.5 kids to create life-giving habits in your life. I think it is better to start these habits now. Just like a habit of daily reading your Bible, finding time to pray with your spouse or your roommate or even just your dog doesn’t just happen. You have to make it a priority and then set a system in place to make it a repetitive routine in your life. The longer you have the system, the easier it will be to continue to follow the system through disruptions in your life. As anyone with kids will tell you, having a newborn in your house (and the subsequent toddler that will happen right after) is a major disruption in your daily routine. It’s easy to let all of your habits go out the window. But, if you have a strong system already in place, you will continue to follow it, even if you have to strip it down to the basics for a time.
Consistency over Perfectionism
I was recently reading a fiction book that described a broken father who had been an addict at the time of his daughter’s birth. In the novel, he was ashamed to go see his daughter and wife because he didn’t want to be a father who was a deadbeat dad. So he just never showed up. Finally, after going to rehab, he held his daughter in his arms, months after he was born. In the book, he said this line, “I knew then that I didn’t need to be perfect. I just had to continue to work towards the best version of myself so that I could be the best father that I could be now. And as long as I am working towards that best version of myself, I’m going to do alright.”
This is true for us as well. We have this image in our minds of what it means to be a ‘good’ Christian, mom, dad, spouse, friend, employee, or boss. Sometimes we beat ourselves up so much for not reaching this ideal that we stop trying. If we change our mindset so that we are simply working towards being the best version of ourselves now, we are going to be exactly what we need to be in that moment. This can give us peace at the moment to fight perfectionism. But, it may also give us a kick in the pants too. Are you working to be the best version of yourself now? Or are you spiraling out of control in your life? The first step is always to develop a daily quiet time routine with God and strengthen your relationship with him. The next step is to develop the accountability that comes with the household.
Family Mealtimes to Fight Loneliness and Cultivate Culture
According to Don Everts, “More than a quarter of adults in the US live alone and it is not uncommon for people to live where no one regularly comes into their home. What psychiatrists call ‘chronic loneliness’ is very common in modern American life, and although most patients suffering from it prefer the diagnosis of depression to that of chronic loneliness, the phenomenon is significant and dangerous.” When we go our own way outside of community, we can easily become depressed and isolated. This will lead us to be stuck in a cycle of negative thoughts and actions that can lead to dark paths. Justin Whitmel Earley describes the habits that we create to be the exact opposite of the loneliness that can destroy us. He says, “But in regular rhythms of coming together, we don’t just find these things out, we find each other.” When we set up regular rhythms and routines, we don’t need to be perfect. We can rest in the fact that we are working towards deeper relationships with each other and with God.
So what does this look like practically? How do we create these rhythms and routines? I’ve mentioned that we should always look to create a keystone habit that leads to a cascade of better choices. When it comes to family culture, the keystone habit that I found keeps recurring in books, podcasts, and articles – as well as just anecdotal experience is a daily family meal. In both Habits of the Household and The Spiritually Vibrant Home, the authors emphasize this. They write, “Numerous studies have linked family meals to all sorts of positive family outcomes, from better academics to better behavior and reduced drug and alcohol abuse. I have also heard that the thing that most Rhodes Scholars have in common is that their families ate together. Don Everts found in his study of Christian households that the families who were ‘spiritually vibrant’ shared one amazing thing in common – they had loud tables.’
Regular family meals together with their parents at the dinner table have numerous benefits. Children who have regular family meals are normally healthy and suffer from less substance abuse. They generally have a better relationship with education, doing better in school and going on to college. The whole family can practice healthy eating habits during their meals together. This one simple habit can have a ripple effect that benefits all family members.
Sally Clarkson has credited her meal times as the thing that led to the spiritual vibrancy of her children. She states that her tables were loud as they discussed and debated great ideas from religion, philosophy, art, and books coupled with their frequent read-alouds. Her kids are all still Christians and many have become writers, authors, and speakers with degrees in theology, music, and more. She wrote a book called The Life-Giving Table that describes why family mealtime is so important to discipleship.
Lessons we can learn from Family Mealtimes
Here are some of the reasons why mealtime is crucial, taken from some of the books I’ve already mentioned:
- Eating cultivates a sense of presence between us and those around us. While we are eating we are not thinking about our to-do lists or our phones. We are not trying to be a million places at once. We are here. We are present. We are human.
- Eating cultivates a sense of dependence on God. In the modern age, we are constantly trying to be our own God, and sometimes – due to technology – we think we can achieve that goal. But, just like the engineers of the Titanic, when we attempt to spit in God’s face and exalt ourselves over him, we may find our ship sinking. Eating puts us back into our place. Much of what we eat is outside our control. Again, modern life makes it seem like this is not true, but that is a facade. If you’ve ever had a garden, you know the trials and tribulations that come with trying to grow or raise your own food. I started seeds this year, and I think that only a few of my little seedlings – 50 small plants of veggies and herbs – actually made it to fruition. God makes it grow. We have to daily remind ourselves of what gives us sustenance. Jesus emphasizes this in The Lord’s Prayer: “Give us our daily bread.” Keeping our need for food and subsequent dependence on God in perspective helps as a physical reminder of our need for God’s word, our spiritual food. A daily meal with others helps us to understand this.
- Eating cultivates a sense of dependence on each other. I follow quite a few homesteading blogs and groups on Facebook. After COVID-19 and all of the fallout that came with that, more people than ever are seeking to be ‘self-sustaining’ and ‘self-efficient.’ They are taking up the old American call to self-reliance. Though I understand this and want to pursue more sustainable practices myself, that’s just not realistic. You will never have enough time in the day to be truly self-reliant – not without going without several basics that we’ve grown accustomed to. You aren’t going to be able to create or find all your own food, clothing, shelter, and soap, not to mention internet, entertainment, or other goods. Even more than that, we also can recognize how our individual family works to create a table full of food every night. Someone must work, someone must cook, someone must clean. If you live alone or have young kids, much of this responsibility falls on you or maybe you and your spouse. However, this can be a great learning experience for your kids as your kids begin to participate in the process of getting food to the table. If we are mindful about what we eat, we grow to appreciate the village that brings us the goods that come to sit on our table. We recognize how we all must work together to live daily. We recognize our need for community.
- Eating cultivates our sense of dependence on creation. Obviously, this leads us to be more mindful of where our food literally comes from. Too often, if you sit in front of the TV each night and binge-watch a show while you eat, you can finish a whole meal without really tasting what you are eating. The same goes for meals on the go. These things might be necessary for a season, but if they become your regular routine you can grow to not really value the food you eat. Mindless consumption can lead to physical problems – weight gain, etc. – and it can lead to negative problems for the world as a whole.
One lesson that stands out to me through this list is that you are practicing family meals that are mindful and intentional, you will also be cultivating a sense of gratitude for God, your community and family, and the gifts God has given you from the Earth. We recognize that entitlement is a big problem with our youth (and ourselves if you’re honest). Part of this entitlement is that we have never needed to be uncomfortable about anything. Whether we want water, Chick-fil-A, or hot Cheetos, I can get it on my phone in less than 20 minutes. With everything at our finger tips, we stop feeling grateful for what we have and begin to feel like we deserve it. Once we feel like we deserve it, these things become necessities that we assume we cannot live without. Through family meals, we can pause and point ourselves to the giver of good gifts, which will help us to live with gratitude and mindfulness in our lives.
Justin Whitmel Earley states, “The daily habit of eating at least one meal with others is important precisely because it asks us to rearrange our priorities around the communal table and to acknowledge that we were made for food and for each other.”
How to Start a Habit of Daily Family Mealtimes
So let’s stop and think practically about what this means for you. Remember, even if you live with just your spouse (and no kids), with roommates, or live alone, you can work towards having a meal with someone. You might just have to get creative. Your meal could be with coworkers (in fact, while I was working, my daily meal with my coworkers was a highlight of my day) or it could be with a friend or family member that you get together with. You may start with a weekly meal and then work towards a couple of times a week rather than daily. The goal is to be working towards the ideal, but it is never a rigid requirement.
- Get to the dinner table.
First, you have to assess where you are currently at with your family mealtime routines. What do your current daily meals look like? Do you normally have at least one meal that you eat with your family or is it like ships passing in the wind? Are your family meals normally around the dinner table? One of the best ways to build a habit that we’ve discussed is to determine tiny habits. If you find that just having a daily family mealtime is difficult, you could establish the time and place of your dinner and label it nonnegotiable. What this means is that you say, “Every day at 6:00 we are sitting around the dinner table to eat.” Now, we haven’t determined anything else – length of time at the table or what you are eating. The first step is just to get you to the dinner table every day to create the habit. Once you are there you can begin to work on some other areas of your family mealtime.
- Limit the devices.
Do you normally have the TV on in the background or do you turn it off and start a conversation? I always think of the story of Matilda. The family she lives with has TV dinners every night and yells at her if she tries to talk. We hope that this is not the case for our family mealtimes, but I know that when I got married that was what we did every meal. In College, I got into the habit of disappearing into my room and watching Netflix while eating instead of staying in the dining hall or common areas. But, Earley says, “The difference between people who happen to live together and families who befriend each other are rhythms of conversation at mealtimes.” Are phones or other devices allowed at the dinner table? Is there an expectation of conversation? Sherry Turkle says that to start a meaningful conversation you need to have at least 7 minutes, but if you have a phone that distracts you, the timer basically starts over. If we constantly let devices interrupt our family mealtimes we may be creating a barrier between us and the people we love.
- Strike up a conversation.
If you are consistently getting to the table and limiting access to the devices at the dinner table, the last step is to create an atmosphere around family mealtimes that is enticing. It should be something that people desire to linger over and sit and savor. How long are your family dinners? Do you stay around the dinner table long enough to get to those 7 minutes that Turkle talks about? It can be helpful to set a time expectation for your dinners. Obviously for toddlers, that time would be shorter than if you have teens.
In fact, Susan Schaeffer Macauley, author of For the Children’s Sake, said that she had two dinners every night. She had several children and so each night the younger children had an early dinner. Then, after the toddlers were put to bed the older children got to stay up for the adult dinner. It was a special privilege when a child graduated from the kid dinner to the adult dinner. Now I can’t imagine – especially while I was working – having two dinners every night. But, you could think of ways to make the table enticing for little ones, teens, and adults. Earley recommends having a ritual that goes along with family prayers that signifies that mealtime is starting. Every meal he lights a candle to help remind his kids that it’s mealtime. This can help as you lay down expectations for what is appropriate behavior for family meal time.
In addition to this, you have to think of what you will talk about. If the goal of family dinners is to have conversations, you need to make sure you have something to fill the silence. For some of you, depending on the personalities in your home, this may not be a problem. But, as someone quiet who is married to someone quiet, that is something we’ve had to learn how to deal with. Earley recommends stating the rose and thorn from the day. This just means a highlight from the day (your rose) and a low point in your day (your thorn). He mentions how this gets everyone at your table to contribute to the conversation and it also helps you to keep track of any prayer requests or needs that your kids have. You also have to think about what you and your spouse are discussing. Do you have topics that are labeled ‘do-not-discuss’ to preserve the atmosphere of your table? Your kids are hearing your conversation and internalizing it, so it’s important to consider how what you talk about is affecting them. I have to remind myself of this frequently.
Your table will be where your kids are learning how to talk with each other and with adults (aka you). Think of topics of conversation that will disciple them and point them towards God. If you find that your current dinner table conversations are not what you wish, you could even make a list of topics and questions that you could bring to the table to discuss. This could be anything from a bible story you read, a character trait you wanted them to have, or a political event that you want to talk about. This is where you are building your child’s (or spouses or friends or your own) worldview.
- Create a life-giving atmosphere at the family table.
Our last question is this: How would you describe the atmosphere of your table? Is it tense or carefree? Loving or hate-filled? Distracted or peaceful? The atmosphere of our table is the subconscious way we are teaching our children what it means to follow God. If we talk about the great power of God, but frequently our conversations are about how we are overwhelmed and in despair then our kids will see the disconnect. If we are trying to teach them to love one another, but we are constantly complaining about someone we work with or a family member they will probably take away that it’s okay to say one thing and do another. We never want to teach our kids to give lip service and not follow through. It’s important to be mindful of our conversations because the topic and tone directly impact the atmosphere.
In addition to this, we need to think about what is going on around the dinner table. Everyone will have a different goal for what they want their dinner table to look like. I think the best way to determine this is to think about what a dinner would look like in your dream, your ideal. Is it lighted candles? Maybe a dinner on the back porch? What type of food? Is there music in the background? Who is sitting at the table?
Once you’ve figured out the ideal, then you can work towards that. You may find that some things are really not that important to you. If it’s messy in the kitchen, who cares as long as there is a home-cooked meal? Or maybe the homecooked meal isn’t really necessary as long as you eat on real plates. Or maybe all of those things don’t matter as long as you have someone there with whom you can have a great conversation. The goal is that you pause and consider what you could do today to create this atmosphere that you want. You could start by creating a list of good go-to topics to discuss, maybe buying some candles, or taking 5 minutes to straighten the kitchen before you sit down to eat. Make a playlist of your favorite songs to have going in the background.
I think it’s important to remember that what you have now doesn’t have to be the status quo forever. If you have a vision for what you want your home and life to look like, small daily steps can get you closer than what you ever dreamed. But, you have to determine what you want and then commit to moving forward daily, however small.
Family Mealtimes is important. It can be a keystone habit that creates a family culture that disciplines your household to become spiritually vibrant.
How do your family mealtimes look? What are your goals for family mealtimes? Comment on this episode to keep the conversation going!
Leave a Reply