One of the most wonderful joys you can experience is simply to eat a meal with your close friends.

Increasingly, families are eating separately, and many people just resort to a drive-thru burger, alone in their car. Make the effort to eat with your friends and family. The dinner table is one of the best places to build community and strengthen relationships.

Spend time around the table with people, enjoying wonderful food. You could be at home, or eating out. Don’t inhale your meal and shovel down a second helping. Eat deliberately. Mindfully. Savor each bite and the conversation that comes between. Don’t hurry to do the dishes or pay the bill. Linger. Laugh. Converse. Go deeper and enjoy the people that you are sharing the meal with.

Food is a relational catalyst and a door-opener to a world of conversation.

>>

When my girlfriend and I spend time together, one of our favorite things to do is to eat. We make the entire process into a time to connect and grow together.

We shop together. We’ll often spend a couple hours at the market simply perusing the aisles, discovering new ingredients, and deciding what we want to eat.

We cook together. Sometimes, we don’t know exactly what we’re doing, but we always work together in the kitchen. Time spent creating something with each other is priceless.

We eat together. Generally, by the time we sit down to eat, we’re ravenous, so the food tastes wonderful no matter how wonderfully/poorly it was prepared. This is a time spent across from each other at the table. Looking each other in the eyes, laughing, talking, growing.

We clean together. After we’re done eating, we wash our dishes. Neither of us like to leave dirty dishes sitting, so this is the first thing we do after we get up from the table. Dishwashing is therapeutic. We don’t use the dishwasher either, we wash everything by hand. Slowly and methodically washing the dishes is a great way to settle down.

We make tea. Once all the dishes are drying, we generally boil water and brew a pot or two of tea. Tea is the perfect dessert. Every time. We’ll spend however long we like drinking tea, conversing more, playing a board game, etc.

>>

If you haven’t eaten with your friends in awhile, make an effort to do so very soon. If you already do eat with your friends frequently, then don’t stop. Because these moments are more valuable than most of us ever realize.