Dinner Time

I don't know what you have to do every day, but I have to make dinner.  Every day.  EVERY.  DAY.
Chicken and avocado enchiladas.
Fajitas with grilled onions, peppers and slices of lime.
Curried lentil soup.
Spinach salad with goat cheese and juicy peaches.

Sounds good, right?  Yep.  Until you've made them a million times - a million times! - and then you don't care if you eat enchiladas or ice cubes.

Occasionally, I get it into my head that we don't have to eat dinner.  We'll eat tomorrow, right?  Noah won't mind eating tortilla chips and apples, right?  As five o'clock and then six rolls around and I'm not in the kitchen, it seems like a REALLY good idea to skip dinner.  Then Noah arrives home and admits that no, tortilla chips are not a meal.  Bummer.  I look in the fridge.  Week-old hard-boiled eggs?  Oh no - wait.  There's just enough leftovers for you.  I'll eat cheerios.  Done!


Tonight's dinner was one of my money-in-the-jeans rescues.  Maybe you aren't the type.  I'm always playing hide and seek with myself.  Accidentally, of course.  I'll put on a pair of jeans to find a $20 in the back pocket.  A favorite pair of earrings will turn up in a purse I haven't used for a while.  My cell phone will turn up in silverware drawer.  It's always a nice surprise when you find your stuff again.

This week, I haven't made it to the grocery, so we're doing the great Fridge Purge.  It's sad folks.  I'm down to some bacon, some almost-moldy-broccoli, salad dressing and a few wilted peaches.  So, poking around the freezer, I was elated to find, buried under a few pyrexes of failed-homemade ice cream, some long-forgotten enchiladas that I'd tucked away for just such an occasion.

Whew!

We don't have to eat bacon-broccoli-peach salad (hmm...maybe tomorrow, kinda sounds good).

As we sit down to tuck into our freezer meal, we read in the lectionary:

 ¹⁷On the first day of Unleavened Bread the disciples came to Jesus, saying, "Where do you want us to make the preparations for you to eat the Passover?" ¹⁸He said, "Go into the city to a certain man, and say to him, 'The Teacher says, My time is near; I will keep the Passover at your house with my disciples.'" ¹⁹So the disciples did as Jesus had directed them, and they prepared the Passover meal. Matthew 26

I love these small windows into large stories.  Who is this "certain man"?  How did Jesus know he'd be home and ready to receive guests?  Willing?  Able?  What about his own plans?

We don't know.

What we do know is this man and his household ate dinner every night.  They shared an evening meal.  Sometimes it was likely rushed and thrown together.  Other times it was more of a to do.  Probably the same ten ingredients rotated through the menu.  But after all those ordinary dinners, an extraordinary one occurs.  From scripture, it doesn't sound as if this man or his household were included in Jesus' passover meal.  They're simply the hosts.

And yet, it strikes me.

All these nights of the same routine.  All these ordinaries.  Dinner.  Dinner.  Dinner.  Dishes.  Chop.  Wash.  Saute.  Boil.  Bake.  And over.  And over.  And over.
But one of these days, God just might say, "I need a host for a very important meal, and that Ellie girl is always making dinner..." and an extraordinary night will occur.

I don't know what makes up your dailies.

Do you do endless loads of laundry week in and week out?  One day, God might need something washed.
Do you answer phone calls minute by minute?  Maybe God will need an answering service.
Do you write report after report?
Give presentation after presentation?  God surely has important information waiting to be discovered and transmitted.

Whatever your dailies are, find the possibility of God in them.

Sometimes laundry is just laundry.
Sometimes it's how God answers a homeless man's prayer for a fresh shirt.

Sometimes making lunches is just making lunches.
Sometimes it's how your daughter gets to be generous toward a friend who doesn't have a making-lunches-anybody.

Sometimes the board meeting is just a meeting.
Sometimes it's when God gets to unleash some of His creativity.

The point is, we don't know when Jesus is coming to dinner.  And when He does, like the man in this story, we might not even get to be a part of the extraordinary.  We might be sitting on the sidelines, God's majestic unfolding hidden from our sight, but the stage was set for just such an unfolding because we made dinner.