bringing dinner back

“You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” — Mohandas Gandhi

The weekend was completely filled with the Global Village Market, a two-day event I help organize annually at our church. It’s an inspiring alternative holiday market where people can buy fair-trade goods or “gifts” — like a pig for Heifer International that changes a family’s life in a third-world country or a necklace that helps a woman in refugee camp in Uganda put her family’s life back together. You get a gift card designed by an artist in our church, an insert that explains what the gift gives back, and voila, Christmas gifts done.

Congo Restoration's table at Global Village Market

This year we raised about $22,000 for 26 organizations, including $1,310 for Congo Restoration, my latest passion. It’s exhausting. My feet hurt. My back hurts. My house is a disaster. My kids have been ignored, shipped off to various sports events by friends who make you realize it really does take a village, especially on weekends like this. We’ve eaten hot dogs, sodas, donuts, lots of pie, candy — the kind of crap you put into your body when time is short and options are limited.

And yet, amid it all, we had an impromptu family breakfast this morning. We never have breakfast together. The boys don’t even sit in their usual dinner table seats at breakfast (they sit in ours) because they know there is no chance Clyde and I will actually sit down. And now we’ve had two together in the past week.

This morning, the boys just wanted orange banana smoothies and mint tea. I wasn’t sure when I’d have time to eat lunch so I joined in with a wheat bagel and Snofrisk (a goat cream cheese my friend Andrea turned me onto). Although the kids practically spit it out when I introduced them to it last month, today it was manna from heaven. So everyone wanted some, with a bagel or cracker as carrier. Even Clyde, who never eats breakfast, added a bagel and Snofrisk to his Bubba Keg of coffee he’d poured for the morning.

An voila, we had a family breakfast. Maybe it was just that everyone was slowly drawn in, like party guests around the hostess in the kitchen. Maybe it was the Snofrisk (which, at $5 a pop, I told them not to get used to as we can only afford it when it’s half price at Whole Foods). Or maybe we’ve gotten used to this daily meal ritual. I knew Clyde and the boys needed to get to Sunday School and I needed to get moving, setting up the Market. But we all lingered as long as we could.

Weekends like this are uncommon. We don’t usually spend them raising money for orphans and lingering over mint tea on a Sunday morning. Tomorrow morning the kids will be back in our dinner table seats for a frantic breakfast of scrambled eggs and an insane number of immune-boosting pills. We’ll go to work and school and meetings, thinking more about what’s right in front of us than what’s going on in the rest of the world.

But being the change was nice … if only for a couple of days.