All We're Doing is Feeding Each Other.

from my Commonplace Book.

Late May, Mike and I celebrated 10 years of marriage. The morning of our anniversary, I sat surrounded by a handful of dear friends from church over brunch who gifted me with so many diapers and baby things to welcome baby #3. Then, last month, we welcomed baby #3 into our family. The day after we had our son, a friend from church opened our meal train and I was close to tears as I watched folks in our congregation sign up to bring us meals for several weeks.

On both occasions, the following words from Harrison Scott Key’s “How to Stay Married” kept rattling through my mind.

I have a list of things I’ve read and listened to I’m hoping to share soon, but until then, enjoy this quote from “How To Stay Married” that’s earned a spot my Commonplace Book. (emphases are mine :)

Photo by sheri silver on Unsplash

“To stay married, you will need more than therapy. You will need an entire community of people insane enough to love both of you, people to whom you cannot and will not lie about what is most real inside your wicked and wondrous heart. #VanLife sound fun, but eventually you’ve got to park the Sprinter and find a village. Maybe it’s a kickball team maybe a book club, though you’ll need more than a love for good novels to bind you together. For us, that community is our church. If church isn’t your thing, I get it. It wasn’t my thing for a long time. I once left the church of my childhood, lively and lovely though it was, because I had more questions they they were prepared to answer. I found myself among other believers at big old churches who were fearless to take on the hardest questions ever posed by the human mind, but with cold and cruel answers…

Somehow, by the grace of the thing we call God and the everlasting mystery of the universe, my family ended up at the weirdest, oddest little church you can imagine, with poor lighting and broken windows.

It was this church of friends who showed us the third way I had always hoped for: joyful, weird, curious honest, fearless, full of reckless love for the broken and a willingness to enter darkness with them. That’s what [we] are. Broken as hell. Our brokeneess, it turns out, and our confession of that that brokenness, and the love we experienced from those around us, despite the brokenness, or perhaps because of it, is what saved us.

What did our church do exactly?..

They hug us. They feed us. We feed them They feed our children and we feed theirs… All we’re doing is feeding each other, basically, with hymns and prayers and sermons thrown in there to remind us why.”