The Crowded Table

I pulled away from my desk late afternoon—too many files open on the iMac: ten essays in progress, a theology textbook review, a high school history curriculum half-drafted, emails, messages—and crossed the hallway into the kitchen. The effort to clear my head became instantly successful.

Rebekah was pulling a pan of cranberry-studded biscuits from the oven. Connie was finishing the green beans on the stovetop, sizzling with bits of beef bacon. Tina was setting glasses on the table—real glasses, filled with ice—and filling pitchers with water. Someone else was working the potato masher in a pot with a satisfying rhythm: bink, bink, bink—soft potatoes with fresh parsley from the garden, garlic, and plenty of butter.

Beck turned back to a deep roasting dish full of pheasant breasts that had been brined the day before and just gently poached on a rack over water, covered in foil.

“Honey, taste this.” She held out the glaze—blackberry, apricot, mustard. “What does it need?”

“It tastes perfect to me,” I admitted.

She came back from the laundry room with my food-ready blowtorch. I lined the pheasant breasts up on a rack, skin side up, and went to work—burnishing them until the skins blistered and sizzled, then painting on the glaze, letting it set, blistering again, painting on more. As everything made its way to the table—pickled quail eggs, pickled green beans, mashed potatoes, pheasant, fresh green beans with bacon—the biscuits came out with a golden brown burnish across the top, and Rebekah swizzled glaze over them in long strokes.

Our neighbors, Rory, Rebecca, and Indy, had been invited to join us for supper a few hours beforehand. Nobody’s birthday. No special occasion. Just a family dinner around the table . . . with neighbors.

We took hands, and I asked our Heavenly Father to help us all relax—to let go of the stress and the hurry and the worry of the day, and to fully appreciate this moment: each other’s company, God’s love and joy, and the fabulous food before us.

Rory and Rebecca had never had pheasant, which made it a double treat that they happened to share this particular evening. I explained that the meat had actually been given to us when it passed its use-by date at the grocery store and had been sitting in our freezer for over a year. You wouldn’t have known. It was as juicy and succulent as you could ask for. The sharpness of mustard and vinegar against the sweetness of blackberry and apricot in the glaze was something you simply don’t find at most restaurants in town. And the fire-kissed skin was the crowning touch.

We laughed and talked and exchanged stories and sat around the table the way we do every single night. The way we did the night before, with our family and another family visiting for the first time. The way we did the night before that, with my wife’s extended family. And the night before that, with a table three times that size for someone’s birthday. Five nights out of seven, we’re breaking bread and sharing our food with at least a couple of people beyond our own kids and the regulars who stop in—including Grandmama, who lives next door.

It happens so often, and there’s such a rhythm to it, that it’s easy to miss how special it really is: all of this cooking and hospitality and fellowship flourishing in a house where writing and publishing and ministry and phone calls and the home schooling of six kids and gardening and the care of 120 sheep and 20-some chickens is also happening all the time.

After supper, we moved to the living room. Connie—16 years old — read her vivid, captivating, creative writing crafted for her English lit class. We talked through the upcoming conference, beautiful songs we’d recently heard, poems that had moved our hearts. Grandma at 74, Connie at 16, Rebecca and I, our guests, Ella at 4 playing on the floor by the coffee table, Aaron and Sean at 9 and 14, Tina at 12—all of us in one room, in one conversation, well past nine o’clock.

“I’m not sure what I’m going to write in my newsletter,” I confessed.

Rory looked at me. “Maybe you should write about what makes y’all cook the way you do.”

I smiled and laughed. But he was serious.

“There’s something about what we encounter here that is truly unique,” he said. “People could live their whole lives and almost never sit down to a shared meal where someone put real intention and pride into even a single dish. And yet that describes almost every night and each dish at your house. And it doesn’t feel like a strain or an ordeal—it seems like it’s actually a grace and a joy for you all. Why is that?”

My mother piped up with the story of the cheesecakes I invented at 11 years old and my early interest in mindful presentation—the kind of motherly bragging that makes you want to change the subject quickly.

But Rory’s question deserved a real answer.

I thought of what we used to tell our catering team before the big banquets: “Remember, folks—you’re not in the business of making food. You’re in the business of making smiles and laughter and a wonderful time for people we care about.”

So we set the table with real plates, real forks and knives, and a napkin in a napkin holder—every day. And we get genuinely excited about how we prepare a bird that was given to us for free—because it’s hard to make people happy. But if you can put a smile on someone’s face the moment they see the food—or smell it—you’ve already said something. You’ve told someone, without a word, that they have value. That this time together means something to you.

And if the first bite puts a broader smile still, that’s a double win.

We can break bread in a way that is pure utility—a function to be completed as quickly and cheaply as possible, with as little mess as possible. When it’s only that, it curdles into drudgery, something we half-resent. But if the point is the people—the love we want to share and the laughter we want to have—then the food becomes the canvas. The context that signals the love. It becomes the language of flavor, carrying a simple but profound truth: God gave us a beautiful life, and He did not give it for our utility. He gave it for our enjoyment.

And we might as well get started on the right foot. Or, you might say, with the right bite.

At some point in the evening, Rebekah read aloud a stanza from a song she’d been turning over in her mind. It landed quietly in the room the way the right words sometimes do:

That’s it, really. That’s the whole point.

There is a somewhat infamous story about Betty Crocker bake mixes. The Betty Crocker cookbooks had been a phenomenal success. But when they introduced the mixes, sales were abysmal. Women in that era felt that they had cheated their guests if they served a cake prepared from a box—and they wouldn’t do it. The behavioral psychologist Edward Bernays eventually diagnosed the problem and prescribed the solution: have the housewife add one egg to the mix instead of just water. Sales shot through the roof.

There is something wretchedly sinister in that: the calculated exploitation of a genuine human instinct, weaponized to sell a product. But there is also something honest and revealing in the story. Those women wanted to give something of themselves. They cared about convenience, yes, but they cared more about being able to say that what they brought to the table was their craft, their creation—something from them. If they couldn’t say that, they wouldn’t bring it. A single egg changed everything, because a little participation made it feel like a little part of themselves went into it.

I think most of us still feel this, even if we’ve largely stopped acting on it. We want to give to the people we love. We’d like it to be easy and fast, but something inside us wants it to be a challenge we actually met, a thing we shaped with our own hands. We want to give more than a mix with an egg in it. We want to give gifts of joy. We want to give respect. We want to put smiles on the faces of the people we care about. We want to take hands around the table and feel —in our bones—that this moment matters.

I pointed out to the room that the kind of evening we were having—three generations in one conversation, from Ella on the floor to Grandma on the sofa—would not have been possible if we’d accepted the default culture of mass-produced entertainment. If Rory and I had been watching a game on a screen, we would not have ranged across the topics or drawn out the voices we shared that night. The screen would have spoken for us. It always does.

This is what it means to build an intentional culture. To understand that something as simple as setting the table is setting the context for the relationships you want to have. That something as simple as not having a television closes one cheap option—one convincing counterfeit—and opens space for something that actually satisfies. That spending time on real food made from scratch is longer and messier and more demanding, but it is an expression of yourself—a participation in life that communicates a value you cannot purchase from another’s labor, no matter how convenient the packaging.

We have been sold disconnection in the name of expediency and affordability, and most of us bought it without noticing the cost. Recapturing a different kind of life takes intention. A few deliberate choices, made again and again, slowly build a culture in a home and eventually in a community. The garden doesn’t grow itself. It never has. But what it yields is real and belongs to everyone who helped tend it, and on the right evening, with the right people around a table that someone set with care, you can feel it in the room.

So, God bless your cooking. Your mashed potatoes and your roasted meats, and your biscuits from scratch. God bless your setting of the table and your commitment to keeping conversation the point of the time spent, honoring it with food worth savoring, and letting it continue into the living room long after the dishes are cleared.

Plant the seed. Let the roots run deep.

And try the reward of giving more than a mix with an egg in it.

P.S. This is the 95th issue of this newsletter, published every week without interruption since July 5, 2024. I’m grateful for every reader who has made that rhythm feel worthwhile.

But I want to be clear: my ministerial schedule is full, my writing workload is substantial, and my daily Bible study demands more of my time than ever before. So, beginning in May, I intend to scale back to roughly twice a month, or whenever genuine inspiration presents itself.

I trust you’ll understand—and I hope you’ll stay with me. In the meantime, you can find me every morning on The Upward Way, my daily Bible study podcast— follow along on Apple Podcasts.