Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes

by Shauna Niequist

When you offer peace instead of division, when you offer faith instead of fear, when you offer someone a place at your table instead of keeping them out because they’re different or messy or wrong somehow, you represent the heart of Christ.

But if we take a chance and come to the table, and if when we are there we are treated with respect and esteem and kindness, then that voice of shame recedes, just for a little while, enough to let the voice of truth, of hope, of Christ himself, get planted a little deeper

and a little deeper each time. The table becomes the hospital bed, the place of healing. It becomes the place of relearning and reeducating, the place where value and love are communicated.

My friend Shane says the genius of Communion, of bread and wine, is that bread is the food of the

poor and wine the drink of the privileged, and that every time we see those two together, we are reminded of what we share instead of what divides us.