Relational Sustainment

We don’t eat out as a family much. There are a lot of us and we have food allergies, so it’s just not worth it frankly. On a recent road trip, we ate out a good bit as we hopped from hotel to hotel. While a headache for my wife and I, the kids loved it. They were able to try new things and stack up new experiences, providing a natural source for comparing each experience. Some restaurants were fast and others slow, some personal and others transactional, some loud and some quiet. All of them had chicken fingers, so we were good.

Unprompted, my son offered his perspective: ‘if I had a restaurant, I wouldn’t have TVs. People should talk to one another instead’.

As I am often, I was dumbstruck. I was lost in my thoughts about the odometer or hotel points or something highly transactional. Switching gears to catch up to my boy took a moment. While I was counting oil changes, he was engineering experiences. He was designing. He was fixing. He was dreaming and imagining and doing all the mental gymnastics that are practice for his future.

Something about the experience seemed off to him. He knew in his bones that a meal is meant to be more than chicken fingers and fries; it’s relational sustainment as well as physical sustainment. He also knew that there were structures standing in the way: TVs were his target of choice this afternoon. On this trip, we ate out of a bag a fair amount — grabbing something to get us to the next meal, which has its place. Yet to my son, sitting at a table to break bread was different — something more.

A table called for relational nourishment, being present with one another for a moment, face-to-face, arm-in-arm. Even though we’d literally spent weeks together, in the same van, sharing the same hotel room, the table was designed for more; something set apart, something sacred.

He knew what was supposed to be and know what was and designed a means to fix it. Simple. And wise.