We Eat In Three Shifts

She counted it up on a Wednesday because of a form from school, and then wished she had not.

The form asked how many times a week the family ate a meal together. She looked at it for a while and then wrote a number that was generous, and then sat with the pen in her hand for longer than the form deserved.

Because the honest number is that the five of them last ate at the same table at the same time in March.

It is not neglect. She would like that understood before anything else, and if you are here doing the same arithmetic you can have it too.

There is a job with shifts in it. There is training two evenings and rehearsal on a third. There is a teenager who eats at half past four because of the bus and another who eats at nine because of the bus. There is somebody who works away one week in three.

So the kitchen is busy from four until nine every single night, and food gets made and eaten and cleared, and there are three shifts, and the microwave has become a serving hatch.

And she stood at that counter after the form and thought: I have stopped even wanting it.

That is the bit that got her. Not the schedule, which is a fact and cannot be argued with. The fact that somewhere in about two years she had quietly filed a family table under things that other families have, like a boat, and had stopped feeling anything about it at all.

You know that form.

Maybe your house has shifts too. Maybe there are only two of you and you still manage to eat at different times. Maybe you eat at the same table with everybody looking at something different and have stopped calling that eating together, correctly.

Nobody in your house is doing anything wrong. That is what makes it so difficult. Every single one of those commitments is reasonable, and the whole thing was assembled out of yeses that were right at the time.

He noticed this first

Here is a sentence in Mark that people read past, and it is the most domestic thing in the gospel.

And he said unto them, Come ye yourselves apart into a desert place, and rest a while: for there were many coming and going, and they had no leisure so much as to eat.Mark 6:31

They had no leisure so much as to eat.

That is your kitchen from four until nine, described by a man two thousand years ago about his own household, and it is in the Bible, and nobody in that sentence is criticized for it.

Read what it is not. It is not a rebuke. He does not tell them they have their priorities wrong. He does not hand them a schedule or ask them to be more intentional or explain that the problem is what they value.

He notices, and He says come and sit down.

You are living in a house He has already described, and the sentence about it in Scripture is a kindness rather than a criticism. That is what Mark 6:31 does by naming the no leisure and then offering rest rather than instruction, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that domestic little clause in the book, which is not the kind of detail anybody would have preserved unless somebody was going to need it.

What is not being suggested here

Let me be direct, because this is the point at which most writing about family meals becomes a burden with a Bible verse on it.

Nothing here is going to tell you to institute a family dinner. No rota, no protected evening, no rule about phones, no scheme where everybody is home on Thursdays, no practice to introduce and defend for six weeks before it collapses and you feel worse than you did before you read anything.

You know your household. You know what would happen if you announced a Thursday. This page does not, and it has no business handing a tired woman a project.

You are not being given a scheme, and nothing about your family's arrangements is being called a failure. Scripture says the LORD knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that to a real person on a real Wednesday, and He was not standing at that counter waiting for you to organize something.

Whoever is actually in the house

Here is the thing that changes it, and it is a change of definition rather than of schedule.

You have been measuring against five. All five, at once, at the table, which happens in March and at Christmas.

So every ordinary evening is measured against a thing that cannot happen and comes out as a failure, and after two years of that a person stops wanting it, which is what happened to you and is entirely reasonable.

Try the other measure. Whoever is actually in the house.

You have a table and people in your house tonight, and that is the whole requirement. The word says where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20), and notice the number, two, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a presence real in a room, which He does with two people at half past four as readily as with five in March.