Super Bowl Sunday. Packed house. Excellent food and pretty good beer. My hands
were free and I had just finished a most delicious hot bowl of beer chili. How on
earth did this mother of five just manage to do that, I wondered? The
conversations and laughter and children’s squealing melted together and faded into the background
as I took a moment to soak it all in. The baby was being entertained by a
couple of the teenagers nearby. The one who held him made cheerful eye contact
with him and responded tenderly to all of his cues. I became curious and looked
around. Sure enough, none of the
babies were being held by their own parent, except one who was still pretty new.
All the others were being tended to by somebody else. One mother instinctively grabbed
a tissue just in time to wipe the nose of another mother’s toddler as he strode
by. My toddler weaved through the crowd, going from one person to the next, pointing
to whatever appetizing thing she discovered on each person’s plate, dazzling
them with her cheesy grin and signs for “please”. Someone picked her up and
took her to fill a plate of her own without so much as a glance my way. My two
middle boys, along with several others around their age, found plenty to keep
themselves busy upstairs: toys, costumes, you name it. But mostly they just
wanted to play together. They chased
each other in and out of rooms, thundered down the stairs, out the door, back
in. Someone warned them all to slow down and be careful around the babies. My
oldest bounced around, equally as engaged in conversation by the adults as he was
in wrestling with the children and brain games with the other kids his age. Those
who cared about the game kicked back in the living room, shouting at the tv from time to time and swapping sports stories that morphed into stories about life. Those
who didn’t care about the game gathered in the kitchen, connecting lives, sharing experiences, and building community, one conversation at a time.
People often ask why we chose Trinity. Here is just one
reason among many, and it’s not even the most important one: our pastor and his wife opened their home on
Super Bowl Sunday, and it felt just like going home to hang out with family.
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