How About Eating Meals Together for a Change?

In many modern households of the poor and middle class, family life is under attack from several directions. Our excessive focus on worldly success and materialism causes parents to spend too much time working, pay too much attention to career and financial matters, and not enough attention to one another and their children. The wide availability of entertainment and other distractions which can affect communication and building of relationships within families (i.e. computers, cell phones, video games, television, i Pods, youth sports, etc.) is greater than ever, and higher educational standards placed on our young these days have put additional strain on the family.

One important aspect of family life that's become a casualty of these times is mealtime. Traditionally, family mealtime has held great importance, and rightly so, because of its positive effect on family relationships, Communication, Academic Performance, adjustment, and Nutrition. Even from a purely secular point of view Mealtime has held great value.

From a Christian perspective, the loss of mealtime is especially troublesome because of its affect upon a most important part of the Christian life-prayer. In the Orthodox Christian Church, for example, the necessity for believers of maintaining a strict, structured regimen of daily prayer has always been recognized, and thus, members of this faith were taught to recite certain prayers before and after every meal throughout the day.

This habit of prayer has existed for nearly two thousand years, since the Orthodox Church was born, but has gradually begun to disappear over the last couple of centuries. This unprecedented lack of daily family togetherness at mealtimes and loss of mealtime prayer can easily be attributed to the advent of the industrial revolution, and even more so, the recent communications revolution. One cannot help wondering what affect the looming biotechnological revolution will have on the existence of true Christian faith in this modern world.

Could this change in family life and the frequency of family mealtime prayer be part of a well thought out plan by the invisible ruler of this world to rid the planet of faith in God? Is it the result of what St. Paul alluded to as the "mystery of lawlessness" in his second letter to the Thessalonians? (2 Thessalonians 2:7) Will it serve to accelerate the general falling away from Christ and His Church that St. Paul told us would happen at the end of days? (2 Thessalonians 2:3) If so, how many of us who consider ourselves Christian have allowed our own mealtimes, and correspondingly, our family's prayer life to be injured or even destroyed altogether by his plan?

Perhaps, in this year of 2011, we should strive to restore this aspect of our family lives; Consider requiring ourselves, as much as possible, to sit and break bread together as families with regularity, always beginning and ending our meals in remembrance of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ by offering ourselves to Him in prayer and thanksgiving.

Let's always strive to keep Him and His promise alive in this world, where his truth is becoming increasingly difficult to find.