The Monday After Sunday: Tabletime Observations

Another Sunday has come and gone, and Monday has begun a new week of work, busy schedules, and meetings galore.  Each of us that sit (or usually sit) around the Crutchfield table have very different looking weeks.  Our Sunday perspectives are, as we discussed in Sunday School, subjective.  However, I think what we all take away is a piece of home and joy, a reminder that may help us through the week.

Yesterday was not a typical Sunday.  Matt was missing from the table, Deborah and I were at a meeting, but the meal continued as usual (although, Mrs. Crutchfield did try to stall for us!).

I believe I am going to change the name of this weekly post.  It will now be called The Monday After Sunday. 

Thus, without further ado, I present an aspiring and delightful writer, Miss Amy Crutchfield and her account of yesterday's time around the table:

I have no stories to tell. I laugh too much, I'm awkward, I can never find the right words when I don't have a pen in hand. But words tumble off their tongues like they're singing to a beautiful melody I want to learn, and they laugh as if they have never wept. Perhaps that is what makes Sunday afternoons in my family's house so powerful - I may spend the week with trails of tears staining my cheeks, but on Sunday they are wiped away. I do not forget them, but amidst the joyous laughter and the silent, understood bond of the community, they begin to seem so unimportant.
There are people present carrying burdens I could not even begin to understand. You can see it in them sometimes, a glimmer of something in their eye, a moment of quiet thoughtfulness, a pause, the sorrow set aside until tomorrow, the dreadful, ominous Monday. While I sit in the solitude I myself have chosen, this look in their eye is familiar to me, but they are something entirely different from me. They are hopeful, they blink the week away and they are laughing, they join hearts like they are brothers and were never even wounded. What I have learned from these friends, if I can explain in coherent terms the mindset of theirs that is shaping the thoughts of my mind into something new, is that grief is temporary. Maybe they were only affirming something I had heard before, but hadn't believed, a small hope I had denied myself for fear it wasn't true. Sunday afternoons, it would seem, can last forever, because I think of them often and the memory of them is my hope.
Matthew said that his Sundays were never dull or boring, but they were dreadful to me once. A day of silence with all of the past week's mistakes free to muddle around in the quiet of my mind, fresh and hurtful moments I strain to forget. But somehow I came to these people with so many burdens, and I'm leaving so much lighter.

I hope you will return for next week's The Monday After Sunday.

I leave you with a cup of tea:

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