I am heading to my family reunion this weekend, and I'm really looking forward to it, as always. Our theme this year is "A trip down memory lane." We're making the best goodies we grew up eating from our parents' generation: tea tassies, cracky bars, sauce cake, and banana croquettes (don't tell Deborah - she despises these and always had to make them, which rumor has it, she has to do again this year) and many other favorites, too. Fingers crossed for banana pudding - from scratch.

We're also taking time for old home movies. It will be fantastic to relive those sweet memories, and at times I'm sure it will be bittersweet, too. The food, the stories, and the memory of our parents' generation have made us who we are, instilling in us this deep, abiding love we have for each other."

None of us attending actually built any of this. Not the recipes, not the stories that get retold every single year, not the particular way we laugh at the same three things every reunion. We inherited it. The generation before handed it to us, imperfectly, without full instructions, the measurements lost or never written down in the first place. Our job isn't to reproduce it exactly. Our job is to live inside it, add our own mess and love to it, and hand it forward.

That's not so different from how faith actually works, when you get down to it. Nobody invents their own spirituality from scratch, whatever the self-help aisle might suggest. We're handed something - a scripture and a story, a community that raised us, centuries of people wrestling with the same questions we're wrestling with now. We don't get it perfectly. We never get the whole recipe. It shapes us, and we add our own lived experience to it, then we pass it on to the next generation.

The sweet and the bittersweet come together for us as a gift of love lived well. We'll eat the food and cherish the memories in the old home movies, and somewhere between the dish nobody can quite recreate and the story we already know by heart, we'll be handing something forward - a little more ours for having passed through us.

My wish for you this week, Reader, is that whatever table you gather 'round and whatever stories you're hearing for the hundred thousandth time, take it all in, and pass it forward. That's the fiLLLed life.

Live a fiLLLed life, Melissa