Kitchen Table Wisdom

“He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.” -Psalm 40:2 NIV

There are some memories that never leave you.

You don’t think about them every day. Years may pass without them crossing your mind. Then something—a holiday, a familiar smell, a conversation around the kitchen table—opens a door, and suddenly you are standing in that moment again.

For me, one of those memories comes wrapped in the Fourth of July.

Before I was born, my grandfather started a logging business. By the time I was a child, it was a source of pride for our family. One Independence Day, after a day spent picnicking and fishing in the mountains, we returned home to devastating news. Someone had set fire to the logging equipment on the job site.

I can still remember the shock.

One moment, everything felt secure. Next, the future seemed uncertain. The loss affected our family financially, but it touched us emotionally as well. Yet my grandfather simply went to work rebuilding. He did not waste time asking why. He focused on what came next.

As I look back now, I realize that was one of the first lessons I learned about resilience.

The years that followed brought other challenges. My grandfather died suddenly. Family relationships became strained. There were seasons when people who loved one another found themselves standing on opposite sides of painful disagreements. There were times when it felt as though the ground beneath us would never stop shifting.

But through it all, one prayer stayed in my heart.
I prayed that love would be stronger than our divisions.
I prayed that what had been broken might someday be healed.
I prayed that God was not finished with us.

Today, our family gathers each year. We celebrate our shared history. We laugh about old stories. We remember our mistakes. We renew bonds that once seemed fragile.

Looking back, I can see God’s fingerprints all over the journey.
Not because everything turned out perfectly.
Not because every hurt disappeared.

But because God’s faithfulness was present even when we could not see where the road ahead would lead.

The Psalmist wrote, “He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.”

I’ve discovered that the rock is not a life free from hardship. It is not a family without conflict or a future without uncertainty. The rock is the steady presence of God, holding us when everything else feels unsteady.

The older I get, the more convinced I become that faith is not about avoiding life’s shifting sands. It is about learning where to stand when they come.

And sometimes that wisdom is learned not in a classroom or a sanctuary, but around a kitchen table, telling the stories that remind us of who we are—and whose we are.

The things we thought would hold us may sometimes fail, but the God who stands beside us never does.

Cathy D.