Relationships

The Hospitable Home

If you were to visit my house in any given week, you are likely to find that at some point during your stay there are other people who are joining us for dinner. Sometimes these are planned events and other times they are impromptu get-togethers, but it is not uncommon for our dinner table to be surrounded by people who don’t live there. When they hear about our frequent guests, many people are tempted to believe that I have a natural bent to hospitality or I have mastered creating a Pinterest-perfect presentation.  However, neither are true. Left to my own devices, I view my house as a place to hibernate. Except for outside influences, it probably wouldn’t occur to me to invite people over to share a meal.

However, by God’s graciousness I have had several things in my life that I have altered my more insular lifestyle and have demonstrated to me the benefits of cultivating a hospitable spirit. First and foremost, as much as I am not given to doling out invitations, my husband is. And because he is intentional about welcoming people into our home, it has created in me a desire to do the same. Secondly, as a result of growing in hospitality I have seen the benefits that can come from the practice. Along the way, I have learned some useful lessons about how to do this better and how to be hospitable without feeling overwhelmed. These practical tools have further increased my proclivity towards inviting others to join us in sharing a meal.

But before we get to the practical tips, it is important to recognize that the first step to create a more hospitable home starts in the heart. We have to understand the “why” of hospitality before we understand the “what.” If we do so, we are more likely to more gracefully bear the challenges of welcoming others into the place we reside.

Here are five things to keep in mind that may help you develop a hospitable spirit:

You Don’t Know Who You Are Having Over

The Bible teaches us that when we welcome others into our home, we may entertain “angels unaware.” While I can say with a certain degree of confidence that I have never hosted heavenly beings, I have discovered that when people are in your home, you learn things about them that you may not otherwise have known. It may seem like you know the people that you talk to on the patio after church, but when you sit around a dinner table or play a competitive board game together, you’ll learn things about their nature, their history, and their walk with God that will help you serve and love them more deeply. I don’t know why going over to someone’s houses affords greater intimacy than eating food at a restaurant, but it does. If you want to build genuine relationships with people (and if you are a Christian, than you should), invite them to break bread with you in your home.

You Can Build Bridges

As I mentioned earlier, my husband has a natural disposition towards hospitality. However, his giftedness in this area can be seen even before people enter our home because at any given event, he is working to help people feel welcomed. If he sees a new person at our church, he will introduce himself, find out something about the other person, and then walk them over to someone else who shares that characteristic in common. I have seen him do this time and time again, and when it comes to have people into our home, this desire to help build relational bridges extends even further. Twice, when new pastors have assumed leadership of the ministry in which we serve, we have had the new pastor and several other leaders in the ministry over to our home. He reasons that since we have served in the ministry for a while, we likely know more people than the pastor does. As it is the pastor’s job to lead the leaders, he can help make their job easier by affording them the opportunity to get to know several of them at once. He uses hospitality so that not only we can get to know people better, but so that he can help others feel more connected and united in service to God.

It is not only within the Church body that we have seen the bridge-building effect that comes from hosting other people. When we have had unbelievers over for dinner, we find that they are much more willing to later accept our invitation to church. This isn’t a ploy – we would gladly share a meal with them even if they didn’t accept our invitation – but we recognize that we can use the means of this world for eternal gain. If God uses a meal at our house to ultimately draw someone to Himself, than that is an incalculable blessing.

You Can Provide Respite and Healing

It is probably unsurprising to learn that the word “hospitality” shares the same root word as the one for “hospital.”  Just like a hospital is a place where healing and respite occurs, so we can bring solace and comfort by welcoming others into our home. We may not even know that we are doing so. But in a word full of turmoil and pain, people often need a place to go to for consolation. Allowing people to share a meal with us, to be in the place where we are the most comfortable, can bring this sweetness to their soul. The impact of this generosity of spirit may not be immediately realized, but we can trust that the more we are willing to host other people, the more likely that as we do so we are going to help bear one another’s burdens and ease one another’s pain.

I learned about this benefit of hospitality by proxy. Throughout his high school years, there were several families who would, without hesitation, invite my husband to spend considerable time at their house. He had dinner with them, he got to know their families, and they helped provide him roots that he otherwise would have lacked. To this day, my husband drops Christmas presents off at their houses because their generosity in his life had such a lasting impact. I doubt that any of them realized the difference they were making in the life of a young teenager, but he is innately aware. He treasures those memories and is ever grateful for their willingness to open their doors, and their hearts, to a kid that needed it.

You Can Help Your Family Consider Others More Important Than Themselves

As parent, I would be remiss if I didn’t write about one of the greatest benefits of hospitality – namely that it compels your children to realize that they are not the center of your universe. When you invite other people, including other children, into your home, your children will quickly be faced with the reality that they can’t always play with the toy that they want, or be in charge of the game that will be played. Toys will be broken. Differences of opinion will occur. And this is not only o.k., but this is good for your kids. They need to recognize that even at home, their job is to think of others as more important than themselves. Having a hospitable home should teach your kids to share more, to love others better, and to be generous with their time, their toys, and their attention. Don’t miss out on these lessons by not including your children in the process of opening up your home. They should know why you have people over, and hopefully, despite the sacrifices required on their part, grow to love it.

There’s No Perfect Time

Lastly, for those of you who are thinking, “I would love to be more hospitable, but…..” – let me help you out. There is no perfect time to have others into your home. You are never going to have things exactly how you want them, or be able to make all the dishes that you envision, or create just the right atmosphere. If you wait until things are perfect, you will always be waiting. The reality is that many of the things that you wish you could get “just right” won’t be noticed by your guests anyway. And even if you could get all those things together, having a picture-perfect experience is a performance and a facade, not a relationship-building endeavor – and it forgoes many of the benefits of hospitality that we just enumerated. Please – do not wait on this. The longer you wait, the less likely that it will ever happen. In future post(s), I will share some practical tips for how you can prepare so that you are ready to welcome people over. But don’t wait. Seize the opportunities. Because if you don’t, you are letting chances to show Christ’s love and to serve other people, pass you by.

Blessings Abound

It would paint a false picture for someone to read this and to think that hospitality now comes easily to me. It still requires that I am purposeful and intentional precisely because it doesn’t come naturally. But the more I have engaged in the practice of hospitality, the more I have seen it’s blessings. And because of that, I am more eager to continue opening up the doors of my home.

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Relationships

A Different Kind of Back-To-School Prayer

Like many parents I have spent time over the summer praying for my child’s school year. As she enters a new school with all the trepidation associated with making new friends and getting used to new routines, I repeatedly petitioned God to provide her just the right teacher and classmates. My concern for her was understandable; she is growing up quickly but she is still my little girl, and I want this new experience to be a good one for her.

However, a few weeks ago as I was praying that God would give my child the best teacher as well as sweet friends, my heart was pricked with a pain of conviction. My prayers were fixated upon what would be best for her without much thought to the people that she would come into contact with. My child was not only going to a new school with her cares and concerns but she would be interacting with a teacher and with classmates that would have their own burdens to bear. Ostensibly she was going to school to learn, but regardless of the reason she is going somewhere, I want her to see any place that she is in as a place to display God’s love. I was concentrating on with whether the new school year would be a blessing for her – without bringing before God the prayer that she would be a blessing to others.

And so the aim of my prayers shifted. Not because my previous prayers were in error; it certainly makes sense to pray for your child’s well-being. However, if I want my child to develop an eternal mindset, it certainly seems reasonable that my prayers for her reflect the concerns of eternity. I concentrated these re-focused prayers in three areas:

My Kid’s Teacher

The angst that goes into finding out which teacher your child has been assigned is a scenario every parent understands. However, rarely do we think about the process from the teacher’s perspective. In less than 24 hours, names on a page become young people entrusted to their care – with their associated quirks and differences in abilities. A teacher’s job is not easy – and there are many students who make this job harder. Instead of simply praying that my kid would get the teacher that would be the best for her, I started praying that my child would be assigned the teacher to whom she could be the biggest blessing. I prayed that my daughter would be an encouragement and help to a teacher who is likely stressed while balancing a myriad of competing priorities. I asked that God would give my child the teacher who would not only appreciate her intellectual curiosity but who would be blessed by her sweet and caring spirit. My heart’s desire became not that my child would have the teacher with the best instructional methods or greatest classroom environment, but instead to have the teacher that will know Christ more fully because of the year spent interacting with our family.

My Kid’s Friends

As we all know from our own growing up experience, kids can be cruel. Therefore, it is tempting to focus my prayer for my child’s friends solely on whether they will be people who will show kindness and grace to her. However, I also know that there will be people that my child will play with who need the opportunity to laugh at her silly jokes and be blessed by her sensitive heart. In other words, there are kids who will become my kid’s friends not because it is God’s primary purpose that they will be a blessing to her – but because she will be a blessing to them. I pray that God gives me the grace to see who these friends are and that my child will, in her childlike way, show them the love of Christ.

My Kid’s Classmates

Although there will be individuals who my child will naturally get along with, there are some kids that my child might not be friends with but with whom she will come into contact. At every school, and in every classroom, there are kids who sit on the fringes. They may think or behave in ways that kids don’t quite understand, and without knowing any better how to handle it, they may be quickly ostracized, or worse, ridiculed. Instead of praying that my child would not find herself as one of the outcasts, my prayers became that she would find these kids. My petition has been that God would grant my daughter the eyes to see the people that are hurting and that she would reach out to them; that in a world full of sin and pain, she would be a light in their lives. You never know the difference that a smile or gracious word can make to a hurting child, and I pray that my kid would be the one to provide it.

Preparing My Heart

I didn’t know why I experienced the prompting to change the focus of my prayers a few weeks ago, but I now know that it was, at least in part, to prepare my heart. In the last few days we have learned more about what this school year will look like for my daughter, and it wasn’t what I expected. In His kindness, God had already begun the process of shifting my mindset to consider how He may want to use my child to bless others, rather than focusing solely on the blessings He has prepared for her. And even though the school year begins with more uncertainty than I originally anticipated, I can confidently still utter my back-to-school prayer. Because regardless of whether it is a great or challenging year for my kid, I pray that because of her, someone else’s year is blessed.

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