I love food.

I’m famous for taking a mixing bowl, you know the really big ones that you are supposed to use when making enough to feed a group at a picnic or potluck, and making the biggest salad you’ve ever seen with all kinds of random ingredients and cradling it like a newborn baby as I go to town.

When I was four years old, and my pre-school class was asked about our favorite foods, I answered “Shrimp Scampi and Crab Legs”. The rest of my class had some variation of pizza, hamburgers and hotdogs. My parents fed the foodie-beast in me from a very young age, and I have long since made it my own.

I will try any food once (with the exception being lamb – I adored the cartoon Lamb Chop as a child and just couldn’t wrap my mind around it, or various pet animals i.e. cat, dog, etc. more on moral grounds than anything else) and have had some really interesting experiences on adventures revolving around food.

I have a line on my bucket list that reads: “Go on a vacation revolving around hole-in-the-wall food places that are life-changing good”

I was a High School Foods teacher for a semester and watched 120 students each have some kind of revelation about their own ability to make good food. They were even amazed of the combination of foods that they weren’t expecting to taste good but ended up delighting them. It was messy, often frustrating, stretching and one of the coolest things I’ve ever done.

One of my very favorite quotes is from Hippocrates, “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” I majored in Clinical Nutrition in college, which is basically the field that says that diets can be created to help heal and manage disease by the choices you make at mealtimes, and it’s been incredible to see the extent to which food really can be medicine in a physiological sense but also the community it can create.

Some of the very best conversations I’ve ever had have been around a table with people, because food is the great equalizer. It’s hard to feel intimidated when the person sitting across from you gets pepper stuck between their teeth, or starts laughing as they are trying to swallow and chaos ensues. It’s hard to take yourself too seriously when you bite into a tomato and accidentally squirt the seeds everywhere, or try to eat rice with chopsticks and fail one bite while epically succeeding the next. Food gives you something to do when the conversation lulls, but it also creates a space for genuine conversation and vulnerability unlike any other medium I’ve found.

The Church in Acts understood this, I think. Acts 2:44-47 in the New Living Translation says, “… and all the believers met together in one place and shared everything they had. They sold their property and possessions and shared the money with those in need. They worshiped together at the Temple each day, met in homes for the Lord’s Supper, and shared their meals with great joy and generosity all the while praising God and enjoying the goodwill of all the people. And each day the Lord added to their fellowship those who were being saved.”

This was one of the most successful accounts of the early church. They grew because they saw and took opportunities to praise God in the everyday life. They were generous, cared for other people above themselves, and lived in community with each other – both at church and around the dinner table. If I get to make a choice about the way I want to love like Jesus, this is it in a nutshell.

I love food. I love the way Jesus uses something as simple as eating a meal in proximity with one another to grow communities, to forge lasting friendships, to meet a physical need, and to change lives. I love that making food for someone else makes the recipients feel valued and wanted, and that in sharing it with them you open the doors for Jesus to love and speak through you. I love that God makes a way to take something we already have to do to survive, and creates a way for us to literally bring life to ourselves and other people by doing it together.

I love meeting friends, both old and new, around a table and laughing while we are all a little bit ridiculous and a lot loved. Together, everything really is better – the food, the jokes, the experience, the life.