To continue on with my recent imagining of places, this is a picture of Flatbreads, an amazing restaurant in the Boston area. It is a chain of several family-run restaurants that has captured my heart completely. In the picture you are looking at a hand-made clay oven, built by the waitstaff in each location. All the food (including the brownies for the brownie sundaes) is cooked in this oven. The food served features pizzas (flatbreads) topped with free-range meats, local-grown produce where possible and flat out amazing combinations. Inside the restaurant all the walls are decorated with artwork, some of it professional and some of it done by local children. There are benches for sitting, nooks and crannies to get lost in, an open kitchen to watch your food, and pleasant sounds of people enjoying themselves. Can you tell I love Flatbreads? They also have weekly benefit nights and love to post community events anywhere they have space. This restaurant nourishes my spirit, which is one of their core values on their mission statement.
So here is our jumping-off point for today: how do we capture that welcoming, organic, nourishing spirit and bring it to the other places of our lives? I am thinking about two places at the moment: church spaces and our homes. Flatbreads knows how to connect with the town it lives in, even though its location (in an abandoned business park) is not warm and fuzzy. Somehow it draws the community into the space it has created, and given them a “voice” in the space. Do our churches reflect the community we live in, or could they be located anywhere? Do the hallways reflect our values? Do we celebrate our community? How? I would really love some feedback here, because I am struggling with this issue in relation to Palm Beach Gardens, where I live. It’s hard to even find the town, much less celebrate it.
This post is getting too long for this topic, but I’m also thinking about how our homes ought to nourish our spirits and celebrate the community that lives in it. I’ve worked hard to make our home a place that nourishes physically (yeah…I can cook) and spiritually on one level, but there is a well of creativity that isn’t tapped when it comes to our home. How do you touch a person’s inner spirit with their physical environments?
I’ve raised a few good questions tonight, and I have no answers. But like every other topic, I’ve discovered that the asking of the questions often brings the answers to light. So join in the conversation if you want, folks. How do you nourish your spirits?
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Great question Marla. I’m convinced that the design of environments is strategically important to what we want people to do or receive in that environment. I’m not exactly sure what that means to our church in Nashville but we are going to continue to explore that concepts.
Great post, thanks!
I’m always into discussions on anything organic, so this read made me feel at home.
I’ll bookmark the site and subscribe to the feed!