Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes" by Shauna Niequist

Page Turner Tuesday 
Life in a Larger Story's Book Club 2016

Bread and Wine: 
A Love Letter to Life Around the Table with Recipes 
by Shauna Niequist 
Shauna Niequist's Bread and Wine writes as if you are sitting around her table and she is inviting you in for dinner. This book reminded me of my love for entertaining. Somehow after reading this book I have again been inspired for my love of food, flavors and friends. She invites you into the experience of dining with friends even when it's messy. As I am writing this I am enjoying Sweet Potato Corn Tortilla Chips dipped into Chipotle Bitchin' Sauce an almond and grape seed oil puree seasoned with lemon, Bragg Liquid Aminos, garlic and chipotles; it's sweet, spicy, creamy and crunchy all in one bite. This also happens to be gluten free. I think I am going to try and go gluten free for a month or two. Here's the deal, I have had horrible acne for my entire life and I have been on every drug and face regiment known to man, I was recently encouraged to try gluten free as remedy. I'm up for anything. I don't think that nearly 40 year olds should still be battling teen acne! UGH! I'll let you know how it goes! Anyway, back to the book. This book feels like a hot tea on a cold night snuggled up in a warm blanket by a crackling fire with gigantic snowflakes falling from the sky. It's somehow feels magical. 

Here are a few quotes I enjoyed from the book:

"More than that, I am a bread-and-wine person. By that I mean that I’m a Christian, a person of the body and blood, a person of the bread and wine. Like every Christian, I recognize the two as food and drink, and also, at the very same time, I recognize them as something much greater—mystery and tradition and symbol. Bread is bread, and wine is wine, but bread-and-wine is another thing entirely. The two together are the sacred and the material at once, the heaven and earth, the divine and the daily."

"And so these days, my mind and my heart are focused less on the pounds and more on what it means to live without shame, to exchange that heavy and corrosive self-loathing for courage and freedom and gratitude. Some days I do just that, and some days I don’t, and that seems to be just exactly how life is."

"What people are craving isn’t perfection. People aren’t longing to be impressed; they’re longing to feel like they’re home. If you create a space full of love and character and creativity and soul, they’ll take off their shoes and curl up with gratitude and rest, no matter how small, no matter how undone, no matter how odd."

"The heart of hospitality is about creating space for someone to feel seen and heard and loved. It’s about declaring your table a safe zone, a place of warmth and nourishment. Part of that, then, is honoring the way God made our bodies, and feeding them in the ways they need to be fed."

"She teaches me, through her words and her actions, that if you take the next right step, if you live a life of radical and honest prayer, if you allow yourself to be led by God’s Spirit, no matter how far from home and familiarity it takes you, you won’t have to worry about what you want to be when you grow up. You’ll be too busy living a life of passion and daring."

"God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. C. S. LEWIS, Mere Christianity"