Feeding Your Family Series: Week 1 - More than a Meal

I have not always enjoyed cooking.  I have not always enjoyed menu planning.  I used to run to the grocery store almost every day at 4pm to grab whatever I needed to make the dinner I decided to make 10 minutes before.  I dreaded making dinner, or even thinking about dinner to be perfectly honest.  I am so thankful we spent our first year of marriage living less than a mile from Safeway, or else I really would have gone crazy running to the grocery store all the time!

I say all this so you can know that I started where some of you may be!  I heard a few ladies from my church talking about their menu plan one day and thought I could probably give that a shot. 

The biggest thing that helped me on my quest to feeding my family (just my husband at the time) was a true understanding of what cooking for my family is. 

Preparing and planning meals is a ministry to my family.  It is one of the ways I can express love and serve them.  When I came to that realization, it really helped motivate me.  It also helped me to concentrate on being thankful that I have a family to cook for!  What a blessing each person is in my life and what an privilege it is to provide for them in this way.

If you are just wanting the tips and tricks about how to plan a menu you will get that in a later post, but I really want to encourage you to think of the "why" behind the "how." I can assure you there will be times you will want to get lazy with your meal planning and if you don't have a good reason WHY you do it, then you will quit!

I also want to challenge you to make the most of dinner time in your home.  Dinner does not just have to be a meal eaten on the run or in front of the television.  Dinner should be an intentional time that you spend with your family.  

You can look all over the Internet for benefits of eating together as a family, but the general facts are that people from families who eat together even a few times a week:

- are healthier

- eat more veggies

- do better in school

- are less risk for drug use, smoking, or drinking

I also read that the average parent spends 38.5 minutes per WEEK in meaningful conversation with their children.  Life is busy, but we should not be so busy that we have less than an hour of good conversation with our children.  One way to beat this scary statistic is to make family dinners a priority.  

I understand that life is busy and dinner probably can't happen every night at home around the table, but I'm sure there are a few nights it can.  If you can't even think of one night that would work, maybe you all need to look at your schedules and see how you can make another time an intentional family time, or maybe something might need to be cut from your schedules.  

I'm not wanting to guilt or shame anyone in this post.  We are busy too!  Maybe start by having one family sit down meal together a week and see how it goes.  Your family might think  you have gone crazy if you start enforcing two hour sit down dinner sharing times.  Start small and work your way up.

I have been to a few homes that have a sharing "routine" at the dinner table if you need some help with starting conversations with your family.

Here are a few ideas:

-Share a high point, low point, and funniest point of your day

-Have a jar of questions and then each night draw a new question that everyone has to answer

-Have a dinner "wheel" of questions and each family member spins

-Do a family devotional book together at the table

The options are endless, but try and take dinner to the next level with your family from wherever you are at now.  Dinner can and should be so much more than a meal.