Dinner table discipleship

I’m helping coach the International School’s girls’ basketball team. Local School Number Five defeated the girls today. I had this silly notion going into the game that Number Five would have an all-girls’ team, too. But while I was watching their team warm up, I was sure that at least three of their players were not girls. But then my wife, generally much more observant about such things than I am, informed me that at least one of the boys was wearing a bra.

We were talking about this at the dinner table tonight. I said, “Some boys need to wear a bra,” after which my son let out this really big, silly laugh-giggle. I was being naughty at the dinner table. It was worth that moment.

I like it when our family eats dinner together at night. We catch up on the day, what student friends of theirs did what, what teachers really bugged them. Our children are perfect, so I know that all the International School teachers are idiots, if my kids say they’re idiots. I could be biased toward my children.

But we’re communicating with each other, and almost always end up laughing together at the table about stuff that we probably wouldn’t talk about to anybody else outside our immediate family.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Family life gets pretty real, pretty raw, if real communication is taking place. We all see each other’s best and worst moments, our best and worst attitudes. Nothing’s really hidden. And, if we can’t love each other after all that, then it’s doubtful we’re going to be able to really love, unconditionally, the people in the world out there, like those bra-wearing boys from School Five.

Family is your first and best discipleship group. Who knows, but God, whom these kids are going to influence one day.

“Discipleship” is so crazy to define, because definitions are either way too complicated or far too simplistic.

But, I think if you look at Jesus, He got so close to a few friends, that His communication with them was raw, real, and open. They spent a lot of real-time hours together (as opposed to virtual, Facebook, Twitter, blogging hours), seeing each other’s responses to life with and around Jesus.

They were experiencing together the miraculous, as well as the everyday mundane stuff. But Jesus, the Creator and Sustainer of the whole Universe and all of life, was walking with them through it all.

So, I think that this level of interaction has to be the foundation of “making disciples”. There are no shortcuts.