Have you noticed that in the last decade or so, dining rooms have become a thing of the past? Doesn't it seem like most newer homes or home remodels are trading in their dining spaces for open floor plans and stream-lined layouts?
Long before Joanna and Chip, I began noticing this trend and even knew of friends who were trying to restructure their living spaces to find other alternatives for their dining rooms, simply because their dining rooms were never used. Never. The dining room table was replaced by the kitchen island and formal meals at a large table have been becoming a thing of the past ever since.
I’m sure that this sounds like an exaggeration and that I’m showing my age as I reminisce about the things of the past I miss so much, like handwritten letters and work ethic and formal family dinners in dining rooms. However, it’s not the great rooms and open spaces I’m opposed to. I adore Chip and Joanna Gaines and the wonderful Fixer Upper age they and others like them have created, as I believe we share the same values about our families and creating beautiful homes for them.
It’s the idea of a family around the dinner table, minus the t.v. and phones that I miss and yes, I will admit that with that “idea”, I’m actually missing my own children being young. Having this dinner time with them daily, was the chance for both my husband and I to hear about their days at school, how their history teachers were instructing them about politics, who their friends were, and what music they were listening to. We got to hear the details of their lives and we did this after saying grace together. Did I mention that we did this every single day? We had to fight against sports schedules and band directors and homework and sometimes even our own work schedules to make this meal time a priority and by the grace of God, more often than not, we were victorious. I believed with my whole heart, in my favorite quote by my favorite President: “All great change in America begins at the dinner table.”- Ronald Reagan. Call me silly, romantic, idealistic; but I still believe this just as much today.
I was reminded of all of this when I read an excerpt from a favorite author of mine: Shauna Niequist in her book, Bread & Wine: “... I want you to stop running from thing to thing to thing, and to sit down at the table, to offer the people you love something humble and nourishing, like soup and bread, like a story, like a hand holding another hand while you pray. We live in a world that values us for how fast we go, for how much we accomplish, for how much life we can pack into one day. But I’m coming to believe it’s in the in-between spaces that our lives change, and that the real beauty lies there.”
So whether you have a brown table under a chandelier in a separate maroon painted room filled with your brown hutch and brown chairs, or you have a modern picnic table out in the open between your kitchen and family room, I say, turn off the tv and phones, and eat dinner together; habitually. More importantly than the house trends we try to keep up with, we need to keep alive the trend of regrouping, away from the noisy world we live in, so that we can continue to love, listen to, and learn from one other, thereby equipping each other to get back out there... refreshed and re energized. I think this is the way a family flourishes and changes the world together.