Is There Space for Another?

Paint in the Cracks

It’s not big, but it does the job.

It is where we do homework, play board games, build lego sets, plant flowers, piece puzzles together, and most importantly, eat and pray together.

I grew up doing the same activities around one my parents still have and I am unashamed to admit I am notorious about keeping ours uncluttered and clean.  I explain to my kids, “This is the place of coming together, of thanks, prayer, important conversations and shared stories of joy, heartache, and truth; what happens - or doesn’t happen - around this, shapes your view of food, family, and everyday rituals.”  

I’m talking, of course, about my dining room table and four, solid wood chairs.  To most, it is just a table.  To me, cleaner and caretaker of it, it is a space for centering, dedicated to swirling everyday routines into sacred stories.  What happens - and doesn’t happen - when we pull up a chair to this five-foot-long piece of furniture, partly defines what we stand for as a family.  An array of objects cover this space at any given time, as the central spot where family members come to create, work, dine and play. 

Looking back, I realize how much of my childhood, especially joyous hospitality, centered around a full, dynamic, dining room table. As a summer camp counselor, I would call my parents Thursday night asking to bring an entire gang of staff home for the weekend and I knew the answer would be “yes.”  The asking allowed them time to buy enough pancake batter, butter, and syrup for Sunday morning.  My parents were surprisingly up for the major inconvenience of nine smelly, snoring young adults sprawled throughout their kitchen and living room for two nights because they wanted to offer some weekend comfort to the international staff.  I do not recall one time when they said no to this absurd chaos of bringing staff members to take over their dining room table, raid their fridge, and basically, disrupt the general flow of my parent’s routine.  

My parents were all but static or boring when it came to honoring guests, having cooked up an environment where interruption, being inconvenienced and lavish hospitality were part of the household operations.  They probably had a line item in their household budget for “Annette’s interruptions and hungry, foreign friends.”  Out of the immediate family, we always hosted the holiday meals and trust me, my mom can cook up one mean batch of mashed potatoes!  The number of meals, memories, games, and difficult conversations that took place at the big, brown table - whether with a foreign staff member or visiting family member - is higher than I can imagine.  Our wobbly, creaky, oval-shaped dining room table was a cornerstone to my upbringing.  For my parents, that table was where hospitality was defined, nurtured, and held as a Martiny family principle.   

For the Snedaker family, the dining room table is about neither perfection or presentation. Each night, as ice is dropped into glasses of water, and knives and forks are set alongside plates, the work of the day is put away, including phones, and everyone pitches in.  Hands aren’t always washed, a condiment usually spills, and there is always a missing fork or spoon the kids claim they set on the table.  It is the end of the day, we are hungry, maybe a bit stressed or tired, but there is this moment - as we look into each other’s eyes and grab one another’s hands - when we are acknowledging and honoring the sacredness, uniqueness, and preciousness of even the most mundane of days.  Through the sense of a gentle touch, and the shape of a circle, we close our day together by naming the gifts we have received or what we are thankful for.  No matter the mood in coming to the table, everyone graciously offers their words of thanks. 

Joy, to me and my family, is widening the circle around our apartment’s only table.  When a child is in our apartment at dinner time, it is standard practice to invite him or her to the table…

“Here,” Leah said to Daniel as she pulls out a chair for him, “Sit here!”

For some of our friends, Leah’s motherly demand to sit at the table is comforting -for others, it creates nervousness.

“Take my hand,” Leah said, as she reached across the table, grabbing the hand of our dinner guest.  Through dozens of dinners with courtyard friends, Leah has never second-guessed the chance to grab a neighbor’s hand to include him or her in our dinner circle prayer, because just as tables are for eating, circles are for widening.  To the adventurous boy running around in the courtyard or riding his bike alone in our busy parking lot until 9pm, our dinner routine seemed formal and a little awkward.  But Mt. Irenaeus, the off-campus retreat center I frequented while a student at St. Bonaventure University, instilled in me and thousands of other students seeking divine connection, that when the table is set correctly, people can connect to God and each other in such a transformative way, they can’t go back to who they were before.  Formality equates to intentionality and the Snedaker Family will always be intentional in grabbing hands and setting the table for grace to make its entrance.   

“Now say something you’re thankful for,” Leah instructed.

I broke in, buffering Leah’s demands, “If you’re not sure what to say…”

“I’m thankful for my toys,” he stated, shyly cutting me off.

“Amen,” we all said together.

The table we sit at each night and gather friends around was not always ours.  Having bought it on a whim one afternoon during a road trip, we learned it had already been used for thirty years by the mother of the man hosting the garage sale.  As newlyweds, we didn’t care how old it was and were just glad to have a table.  As the years went by, we adopted puppies, had babies, hosted great parties, and slowly, the shiny gloss faded. Hundreds of small scratches and dents took over, and we even lost one of the matching chairs thanks to a teething Siberian Husky we thought could be trusted alone.  When we moved to Florida, this old, small, beat-up table and misfit chairs was one of the few pieces of large furniture that did not drive away on the Goodwill truck.  The table has been through so much and it began to bother me the chairs did not match and that even after wiping it, the top still didn’t look clean.  

But do you know what God does with old, beat up, mismatched furniture?

God uses it the same way God uses beautiful, new furniture -as a centering space to share stories, hold dirty hands, offer giant bundles of hearty thanks, laugh without holding back, and grow in delicate relationship with one another, even on the tough days.  

And the little boy?

That is what he saw.

He didn’t see the cracks or notice the mismatched chair the Siberian husky left in her wake.  The next time he was over, he asked to stay for dinner because even an old table like ours does more than feed the body.  The sacred table, with all its awkward formality, annoying manners and messy spills - also feeds the soul.  

Four years and dozens of hosted dinners later, I’m left to wonder:  If I had a new, luxurious table, would I have been so open to neighborhood kids sitting and painting at it? Probably not.  The old and worn table, having seen it all, insisted I not worry about a child coloring on it or someone spilling paint into its cracks.  It insisted the priority be keeping people at the table, not keeping the table pretty.  

It insisted on widening the circle.

Peace,

Annette