Feasting

Bread is made for laughter,

and wine gladdens life,

and money answers everything.

Ecclesiastes 10:19

Feasting is one of those lovely words that just fills us up with delight. All the nooks and crannies of our stomachs are filled, but even more important is the filling of the soul. Yes, we believers ultimately feed on the Word preached and the Lord’s Supper, but we are also finite creatures with bodies, and feeding the body feeds the soul. Numerous passages in the Bible remind us that food is good for us, body and soul.

See, our evolutionary world laser-focused on only the material doesn’t understand feasting. It doesn’t get celebration and thanksgiving unless it’s couched in Me-Time. An evolutionary world has to skate over its inconsistencies to enjoy feasting. How can it be otherwise when the world no longer wants to believe we have created, eternal souls? How can it be otherwise when the hearth and home are cold?

Feasting is eating for JOY, thankfulness, delight, and sharing. It is warm and wonderful and work. Yes. Feasting is work. If we don’t acknowledge that, we won’t ever enjoy feasting. It will always be drudgery if we don’t start, as the Ladies of the House, the tenders of the hearth and home, with the truth that feasting is an act of labor.

Feasting is work, a special work. Because of the labor cost, it should be done only a few times a year. Feasting should be held high in our hearts and only engaged in on occasion because it is special. We don’t want to make feasting rote. Keep this in mind always: special work.

Consider two things:

1) Prep with Merriness: since we all agreed feasting is work, but special and valuable work, we need to mentally, emotionally, and practically engage in it with merriness. How can we or our people properly enjoy a feast if it is nothing but complaining, complaining, complaining? If every day leading up to the feast is spiced with whining and bitter complaints, the food and festive mood will turn to ash in everyone’s mouths. Great. You ruined the holidays.

We all need to get ahold of our hearts, ladies, and tend, not break.

Put on some music, pour some wine, make a plan, and dance. Turn the oven on, fill that dishwasher, and make those pies! Laugh, smile, and sing as you pour some extra TLC onto your people!

2) Prep with Help: This work should not be done alone. What’s the point of lonely feasting? Embrace your relational side. Welcome daughters into the work! Pass dishes and desserts off to friends and family. Embrace the crazy that is everyone in the kitchen. The feast isn’t simply the five minutes of eating. It’s the shopping, choosing fruits, vegetables, meats, and more with love. It’s the smell filling the house for days. It’s little things you do a week out that build up to what you do the day before. It’s the kitchen dance as everyone gets in our way on the day of the feast. Pour more wine and enjoy!

Don’t go it alone. Don’t be a selfish martyr who acts like they must do it all, and all alone, woe is me. Kids, sisters, mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and all the in-laws and out-laws can join in the merrymaking every step of the way! This starts with us and our attitudes. We are the biggest influence on feasting being a delight or a doldrum. That’s the power we have.

Finally, we all sit, squished around tables and kid tables and the feast begins!

Eat slow.

Get small servings and then get seconds.

Linger.

Be together.

You have poured all this labor into this glorious food. Enjoy it! Let the tastes and textures thrill you. Rehearse those well-trod paths of old stories and memories. Get loud. Sit for five minutes. Observe your happy, content people and be thrilled, oh tenders, at the feast, all the feast. From start to end, planning, cooking, consuming. Enjoy the feast!

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One of our Pastors, Jarrett, recently preached a great sermon on Feasting. I know I need to listen to it again and be reminded, as a homemaker, of the blessing of a good meal. Both as an acknowledgment of God’s continued care and provision of our daily bread, and as a reminder of how good for the soul food and wine is!