Neighbors Restaurant
A WHILE BACK, my friend Laura and I met after work to catch up. Neighbors is a restaurant just over the Jefferson Street Bridge from Cross Point Church. My office used to be at the church and she lives in the same neighborhood, so it was an easy choice. She beat me there. She always does. And I came in with a gust of wind at my back and papers flying everywhere (or at least that’s how it felt).
My days, in general, feel too rushed. I don’t know why, and I don’t really like it. Most days I am hopping from this place to that place, from this project to that project, out of one meeting and into another. It’s usually the last meeting of the day when I really feel that windblown experience of my rushing in and sitting down and apologizing and laughing. Laura is used to this and to me. She’s a business owner as well, so her schedule is packed from start to finish each day.
She had already ordered a gin and tonic. I ordered a cider. It’s my favorite happy hour drink, especially when I am rushed and it’s the summer and I just want to relax with a friend.
We quickly started chatting and catching up. She runs a magazine I love called Good Grit, and we have fun talking about business—the best days and the worst days, the ups and the downs. We also talked about relationships with men (me in dating, her in marriage to a man and parenting young men), our shared love of Onsite, and the way we saw God moving in our lives and the lives of the people we love.
We spun through all of those topics at Neighbors. I tend to find that even on the busiest days, just to sit and process through it all with someone slows down my mind and my heart. We talked about two friends who were struggling, whose lives seemed to be falling apart, and what we could do. There’s never a good enough answer for how to help a broken story, and we talked about that too. And then, a little out of nowhere, Laura said, “I’m going to make a list of all the things I want to try.”
And everything she listed required her to be an amateur. Everything she listed required her to fall in love in one way or another. Everything she listed was an activity that someone else would call a hobby.
LAURA WANTED TO MAKE a list because she needs space in her life and new experiences and I think, deep down inside, she needs to feed the hunger. “I think we are living in the hungriest generation ever,” she told me. And I knew she wasn’t just talking about food; she was talking about our souls. We fill our calendars and fill our lives and try to fill our bank accounts and our hearts, but what was it about that hunger for satisfaction that made her want to make a list? What about that list feels like a map to Eden?
Laura thought she needed a hobby or two. I would actually say we all do.
Hobbies make space. They remind us of something beautiful, and that good can come from nothing. That seeds become flowers and ingredients become soup and yarn becomes mittens. And when the whole world is broken, it’s just nice to know we have the tiniest ability to put pieces together.
I LEFT for Lost Valley Ranch very early the morning after my birthday, so there was no time for my Nashville friends to celebrate with me. My girlfriends were super kind and reminded me as soon as I was home from the ranch that we would go to dinner. I have a few restaurants that I like to choose from when we’re getting a real night together, and Virago is one of those.
Virago is a bougie sushi restaurant. Their amazing happy hour menu from 2012ish is gone, but my favorite things are still on the menu (or you can ask for them and they know): a crispy rice spicy tuna roll and a super sweet strawberry and champagne drink.
The girls and I piled into a booth, about eight of us total, and we all started talking too much and too fast and ordering rolls and drinks and edamame. As the meal came out in rounds, I asked them the same question Laura and I had been talking about. I asked if any of them had any hobbies.
In the group, we are mothers and wives and girlfriends and friends. We are employees and employers. We are homeowners and home renters. We are churchgoers and church skippers.
But that question silenced us.
No one had a hobby.
Some gals started stammering out some words, so I pulled out my phone and started taking notes. I was fascinated. The theme was the same around the table. It was like we all forgot hobbies were an option, but when we started to think back, yeah, we wanted one. Ashley wants to grow vegetables like she used to pick with her grandmother. She talked about the tomato sandwiches they would make. Someone else mentioned fishing, a thing none of us have ever discussed or considered as a social activity. But something happens when you start letting your brain’s Rolodex pull up the things that remind you of Eden.
Cooking.
Gardening.
Singing.
Fishing.
Within minutes, the words died down again and it seemed like everyone went somewhere else in their mind. Back to Eden. Back to love. Back to when being an amateur was a simple celebration of life. And I think we all felt it. That maybe there are ways we could be stitching things back together.
There is this opportunity, especially for people of faith, to partner with the God we serve to make things better on Earth. John Mark Comer writes about it in Garden City, but many pastors and teachers also talk about it a lot. We were always meant to create. To create with God, to take the natural resources on our planet and in our hearts and put them together to make something that brings life and flourishing to ourselves and our neighbors. I don’t know this for sure, but maybe that was easier when people lived more slowly and more intentionally and didn’t have Instagram. Maybe the days on the porch with my grandmother, snapping the beans, were building something I couldn’t see.
By definition, hobbies are activities “done regularly in one’s leisure time for pleasure.”1 We could chop that up and deal with each word: regularly, leisure time, pleasure. But you see them too. You can think long and hard about those words that describe a hobby.
I wonder when we lost them. I wonder when we quit choosing them. I wonder when we quit doing things regularly, for pleasure, for fun, in our leisure time. And I wonder, as I think about my own life, where my leisure time has gone.
But I do know this. I want it back.
Because I want to make a list of the things I can do that bring me joy and bring God glory. Things that may also sew little corners of the world back together.
THE LIST LAURA was making while we sat at Neighbors isn’t short. It’s full of things she wants to make time for. Things she wants to fit into her schedule and her life. All things that pay nothing. In fact, they all cost something in time, and many cost something in money. But they all put the world back together in some way. Here are a few examples.
Take piano lessons
Learn to dance (take dance class)
Skydive
Scuba dive
Hang glide
Learn about wine and deep origins
Take a cooking class
Go to an improv night
Start a girl band
Join a book club
Now that last one is something I know about.