Friday, March 23, 2012

Why we do what we do. . .

"We can't love God unless we love each other. And to love we must know each other. We know Him in the breaking of bread and we know each other in the breaking of bread. And we are not alone anymore." ~ Dorothy Day





There is something very symbolic about food, . . breaking bread together. It transcends language and culture. We had a "leadership" meeting at our home amongst our friends from the Jubilee Food Pantry last weekend. It was amazing and remarkable. Simple too. We broke bread (well, actually not bread we had homemade and authentic posole and enchilades) with our amigos. It was really the first time that we had the opportunity to share our vision for the pantry: build community, love one another and enter deeper into the Kingdom. It was especially cool for me in that many of the husbands came with their wives, which is usually not the case on Tuesday evenings. As what I shared about our hopes and dreams with this community was communicated by one of the family's high school aged daughter, there were a lot of heads nodding and quite a few smiles. This is encouraging since many had no idea why exactly we do what we do ~ other than to love Jesus. I think the quote from Dorothy Day above sums it up very nicely and I will paraphrase: we cannot love God fully unless we are loving each other, we love each other by truly knowing each other, we can better know one another when we break bread together, when we break bread together we become community. Pretty simple and the posole was good!

1 comment:

Aging Ophelia said...

Sweet story, and a needed reminder to me today, as I am stressing out planning a family gathering-- and my family is under some heavy clouds just now. Giving to them generously, instead of worrying, will make all the difference.

Thanks, Mari