Editor's note: Enjoy today's devotion written for Devotionals Daily by Ian Simkins, author of Every Table an Altar.
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It was one of the strangest things I ever saw my grandmother do.
I was a kid, and my grandparents had driven from Arizona to Michigan to spend part of the summer with our family. One afternoon, a bunch of us were packed into our little kitchen making the kind of lunch that would make absolutely no appearance on Instagram today: boxed mac and cheese, hotdogs, and lemonade.
After lunch was ready, I grabbed the pot of leftover hotdog water and headed toward the sink. Just as I was about to pour it down the drain, my grandmother practically lunged across the kitchen.
“What are you doing??”
I froze. “Um... dumping out the hotdog water?”
“Not on my watch!”
She grabbed the pot, marched outside, and carefully poured the water over the flowers in the front yard. Then she came back inside, poured what remained into a plastic bag, put it in the refrigerator. She then looked right into my eyes and said:
“Don’t ever waste water.”
I had no idea why she responded like this.
But my grandmother lived in Arizona. She knew something about water that I didn’t. To me, water was ordinary.
Abundant. Disposable. If I wanted more, I turned a knob.
To her, water was precious.
I think about that little kitchen sometimes because I wonder how often I do the same thing with the moments that make up my life. How many sacred things have I nearly poured down the drain because they looked ordinary? A Tuesday night dinner. Coffee with a friend. The conversation in the car after school. Lunch with a coworker. Ten unhurried minutes across a table from someone I love.
- We spend so much of our lives waiting for the extraordinary that we can miss the holiness hiding inside the ordinary.
The Bible is filled with people who discovered that ordinary places can become holy ground. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, and Joshua all built altars in places where they encountered God. They would stack stones as a way of marking the spot and saying, in effect, Something happened here. God met us here. We don’t want to forget.
But one of the great surprises of the New Testament is that the dwelling place of God is no longer confined to a particular location.
Paul writes:
Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst? — 1 Corinthians 3:16
Think about what that means. If you belong to Jesus, you don’t have to travel somewhere sacred to encounter the presence of God. His Spirit lives in you. You carry His presence into your kitchen, your workplace, your neighborhood, your minivan, your favorite coffee shop.
Which means ordinary places have extraordinary possibilities. And nowhere do I see this more clearly than at the table. Pay attention to the life of Jesus and you’ll notice how often He is eating with people. He eats with religious leaders and social outcasts, with close friends and notorious sinners. He feeds crowds. He attends parties. He tells stories about banquets. On the night before His crucifixion, He gathers His closest friends around a table.
Jesus seems to understand something we have forgotten:
Presence is the medium of love.
Love needs somewhere to happen. And again and again, Jesus lets it happen around a table. And that’s significant because many of us are living increasingly distracted and disconnected lives. We can be in constant contact with people while rarely being fully present to anyone. We can sit across from someone we love while simultaneously answering an email, checking a notification, reading the news, and wondering what we need to accomplish next. I know I can. I’ve preached sermons about community on Sunday and eaten meals alone in front of a screen on Monday.
Somewhere along the way, many of us have begun treating efficiency as though it were one of the fruits of the Spirit. We rush through meals and multitask through conversations.
But Jesus rarely seems to be in the hurry that I am.
He sits.
He eats.
He listens.
He looks people in the eyes.
He asks questions.
He receives invitations and extends them.
What if one of the most spiritually significant things you could do this week is simply refuse to rush through one meal? And just to be clear, there isn’t anything magical about a dining room table. You don’t need the perfect house, the perfect menu, the perfect schedule, or the perfect family.
Paper plates work.
Takeout works.
What matters is presence.
The presence of another human being made in the image of God and the presence of the God who promised to be with you.
This is what I mean when I say that every table can become an altar.
An altar is a place where something ordinary becomes sacred because it is offered to God. Every table in your life can become that kind of place.
So try something simple this week. Choose one meal. Put your phone somewhere you can’t reach it. Turn off the TV. Sit down. Ask a question you actually want to know the answer to and listen long enough for the conversation to move beyond the surface. And before you eat, pray something as simple as:
God, help me recognize what is sacred here.
Then pay attention. Because the moment you’re tempted to hurry through may be the moment you’ll someday wish you could have back. The conversation that feels ordinary may be the one someone desperately needs. The person sitting across from you may need to be reminded that they are seen, known, and loved.
Your ordinary Tuesday night dinner might become holy ground.
Maybe the sacred life isn’t waiting somewhere else. Maybe it’s already sitting across the table.
Watch the Video
Written for Devotionals Daily by Ian Simkins, author of Every Table an Altar.
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Your Turn
Where are the ordinary “tables” in your life? Choose one meal this week to practice complete presence. Put away the devices, slow down, ask good questions, and pay attention to the people God has placed in front of you. And before you eat, simply pray: At this table, as it is in Heaven. ~ Devotionals Daily