Recently I shared some tips for preparing our hearts towards hospitality. As we anticipate welcoming people into our home it is helpful to remember the many benefits that can be accrued from this endeavor. It is a sacrifice to open our doors to other people, but it is a sacrifice that can honor God and bless those around us.
Some of us may be quick to agree that hospitality is good, and we may even be eager to claim some of its benefits, but we don’t know where to start. Below are some practical tips for how to prepare in order to be more hospitable. Unlike many of my posts, I can’t cite chapter and verse for these things. If you want to know the biblical support for being hospitable, please go back and read the previous post! But if you are looking towards the holidays and the start of a new year and you want to increase the frequency and the intentionality with which you welcome people into your home, these things may prove helpful.
1. Keep your freezer stocked.
Of all the things I do so I can be more readily hospitable, this is probably the most effective. If I know I have a meal in my freezer that I can easily warm up, there is very little excuse not to invite someone over. For those of you who may be more elaborate cooks this I am, this may take some flexibility and adaptability on your part. Five course meals don’t freeze well. But lasagna, enchiladas, and many other things do! Remember – you are not inviting people over to impress them with your cooking skills – or at least you shouldn’t be. You are opening the doors of your home in order to be a blessing to someone else. If you keep a meal on-hand at all times, you will be primed to be this blessing at any moment.
2. Have easy recipes that feed a crowd.
The counterpart to the previous suggestion is that sometimes, even with the best of intentions, you won’t have a meal ready or you won’t have a big enough meal to feed the number of people that you want to spontaneously invite. In this case, you need a couple go-to recipes for which you always have the ingredients. Tacos is one of these meals for our family. It doesn’t take a lot of time or preparation to make tacos as long as you have everything on hand. (Another advantage of tacos is that they are easily customizable for each eater’s preferences. You don’t need a repertoire of elaborate recipes. You need a few that are in the regular rotation that you can commit to always having the supplies. Again – the goal here isn’t to provide a restaurant experience – there are restaurants for that. The goal is to serve other people and to invest in them for Kingdom purposes.
3. Put it on the calendar
Where I have most often seen the failure of good intentions when it comes to hospitality is in the actual planning of it. We are quick to say, “we should get together sometime,” or “we’d love to have you over.” If I find myself saying or texting this, I try to discipline myself to either ask for dates, or to suggest some specific times we have available. This isn’t to be pushy (although you will have to ask those we have hosted to find out if they have thought it was!); without scheduling the time, it is easy for the invitation to always be an idea and not an actuality. Even if the date needs to be changed later one, you are more likely to do so if it is scheduled in the first place. Try to avoid vague invites. Be specific – the most proactive you are about scheduling, the more likely that it will actually happen.
4. Keep it in the family
If you read my previous post on hospitality, it may not surprise you to learn that, as often as possible, you invite the whole family. There may be times that you need to schedule time with just your adult counterparts. But as often as possible, include the kids in the invitation. This is not only good for your kids, as I previously mentioned, but it is going to make it easier for your guests to accept. Plus, you will get to know them more if you not only see how the interact with you, but you also get to witness their family dynamics. Your floors may get a little dirtier, and you may have to spend a few more minutes cleaning up when everyone is gone, but in the long run, it is worth it.
It Starts With a Plan
As someone who is organized and likes to prepare, one of the biggest hurdles to being hospitable is that I frequently felt like I wasn’t prepared. However, now I just plan that I will have people over at some point, even if I don’t know the date or the time. I expect that we are going to want to issue an invitation, and if so, I know that whether that invite is for today or in a week, I will be prepared for guests. This is a game changer. It means that the foundation for hosting is already in place, even before the invite is issued. All I need to do next, is actually host people. In a future post, we will discuss some tips for doing that. In the meantime, stock up that freezer and schedule a time to get together with that person you have been meaning to reach out to, and just haven’t done so yet!
