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The kitchen table – where so many of life’s important moments occur - is where Reverend Sharon Lee MacArthur remembers learning to give the best away.

“My mother had turned the entire back yard into a garden,” Sharon says, :"and it was at the kitchen table where I helped her sort the vegetables.  Neighbors and acquaintances received the best ones - the cream of the crop.  Cousins and other extended family members were given the ones that were not as pretty.  The vegetables that had some damage were used in our immediately household.  With my mother, I experienced sharing our abundance.  It was a celebration of what we had and included all those around us."

Reverend MacArthur is the pastor of Sycamore Congregational in El Cerrito, California, former chair of the United Church of Christ's Executive Council. She describes how she took to hear that childhood lesson of sharing, when she and her husband first joined a church.  She says, "Even though there were no assets to speak of, we decided to tithe.  All of these wonderful things started to happen.   

The idea of sharing with the family of God had always been abstract.  As I meet other people on this journey - people in other cultures, people of other ethnicities, and people from other countries - it becomes more real.  I have a new definition of the family of God.  A sharing and generous heart comes much more naturally.