Lunch Time

I just got back from a lunch "date" with our youth leader Melissa. It was great, I bundled up in my jacked and walked over to P.F. Cheng's for what I knew would be some great food and good conversation.

That lunch was typical of any lunch I share, we were there for 2 hours. I'd told Abby it'd be about a 2 hour lunch which did kind of surprise her. She who was probably wondering what in the world you'd talk about for two hours, especially with someone you know somewhat well.

The funny thing is, every time I go out to lunch with someone we never spend much time talking about what we were supposed to discuss. This time I'd had a few things I wanted to talk about regarding youth group. We didn’t even start talking directly about youth group until after the check arrived (so, we'd had about an hour and a half already).

We ended up spending another 20 minutes or so in the hallway outside the restaurant (it was clear they wanted us to leave, they took Melissa's water away instead of refilling it) finishing up the talk about youth group.

I walked away from that lunch like many others, feeling some accomplishment in what we'd set out to do, and like I only scratched the surface of who Melissa is. People just have incredible life stories to tell.

Even a person considered incredibly boring will have an interesting story for whoever will listen, because their life is interesting to them. So they'll always have insights and stories to tell which they care about.

It was a successful lunch in any form of the word. We got a few things cleared up, shared some great food and got to know one another a bit better.

I only wish I could do lunches like that more often. Being able to set-aside some real time for another person makes such a difference. It's a time when cell phones are ignored, work is put on hold, and two people dedicate their time to one-another.

In our lives where we go a million miles an hour (sometimes I think I may hit a billion mph) we forget to dedicate our time to an individual. It just feels like bad time management. Why spend hours with one person when we could be checking e-mail, on a conference call, on IM and doing some work at the same time?

Lunch though made me remember that efficiency isn't the name of this game called life. We're here for God first and one-another second. We're here for two hour meals to talk about life. We're here for walks along the beach. We're here to simply share life for a while.

Peace,
+Tom/Bob

posted by Tom at 2:06 PM