{what if hospitality isn’t your gift?}

Every Christmas during my childhood, my mom threw a gigantic party for her friends.  She wrote out long lists of chores for my sister and me, although mostly I did them by myself because my sister had a gift for disappearing when it came time to do any housework. (Not that I’m bitter.)

We cleaned all week, though my mom already kept an immaculately clean house.  We helped her make hors d’oeuvres and desserts for two days prior to the party, and no matter how hard the three of us worked, there was always a mad rush to finish up before the 15-20 couples arrived for the party. And there was always one disaster that made us fearful that people would walk in to discover an unscrubbed toilet (and if that happened we might as well set fire to the place and burn it to the ground).

One year, my sister was responsible for loading the dishwasher and turning it on, but instead of using dishwashing detergent like Cascade, she used Dawn.  You can see where I’m going with this.

One minute the three of us are doing last minute spot cleaning, while my Dad wisely stayed out of our frantic way, and the next minute the entire kitchen floor is covered in rapidly multiplying soap suds.  The white foam pouring out of the dishwasher was growing exponentially every few seconds, and my sister wrung her hands helplessly and repeated the phrase “I didn’t know!” while Mom and I tried to scoop up suds and dump them in the sink.  It would have been a disaster except that my mom started laughing, and once we joined in we couldn’t stop.  We used bowls, pots, a dustpan—anything we could find that would help us get the Dawn-scented cumulonimbus cloud off the floor. In the end, the kitchen floor was cleaner than ever when guests began to arrive. You could have eaten off that kitchen floor.

My mom has always been a good hostess.  She has especially excelled at long-term hosting.  Not long after she and Dad became empty-nesters, they housed some college students for an entire semester after a tornado destroyed the dorms at the local university.  They also shared their home with a single mom and her three year old for several months, and then later with a young, married couple who were in transition to become church planters in Colorado.

I, however, did not inherit her gift for and enjoyment of hospitality.

I’m an introvert, and for me that means that my home is my sanctuary and my place to recharge…quietly.  Without lots of people around.  The three people I live with I love dearly, but sometimes I even hide from them if I’m really struggling with external sensory overload.

Because I’m also a pastor’s wife, I have spent the last eleven years in ministry alternately avoiding and and guiltily opening my doors to others.  If I had kept all the calendars of the last decade, I could flip through them and see seasons where I was listening to God when He spoke to me about inviting others into my home because there were heavy sprinklings of dinner dates written in. Conversely, where I was clearly resisting the call to be hospitable was evident in the many blank tiles filling the weeks and months. Over the years we’ve had countless meals with church members or neighbors at our table, and we’ve provided a guest room to missionaries, traveling musicians, a medical student, and lots of friends and family who’ve come to visit.

But, I can’t say I’ve done any of it well or with a fully compliant heart.

Sometimes I envy people who can open their front door at a moment’s notice without feeling an iota of stress.  Sometimes I don’t envy them because it means I can let them do the hosting while I keep my door firmly closed.

My struggle with hospitality is anchored in both pride and selfishness.

Pride because I’m nervous that people will judge me if the house isn’t clean enough or the food isn’t fancy enough.  If it can’t be perfect, I don’t want to attempt it. If I can’t serve a perfectly cooked piece of chicken or a salad that people remember and ask for by name, then what’s the point? It doesn’t seem worth the effort if I feel like I’m going to fail. Better to not even start. My husband loves having people over, so I think he has some kind of super specific myopia that prevents him from seeing clutter, dust, or a nearly empty fridge.  It has always seemed to me that you have to have that kind of vision problem if you’re going to be a hospitable person. The ability to overlook my cooking disasters or the hand-me-down trappings of my home is not something I possess. My furniture is wonky and dated (and not in a hip, vintage kind of way), and the dining room table keeps coming apart where the leaves meet in the middle so that every single guest gets in the habit of pushing the leaves back together while we sit and eat.  It’s mortifying. Exactly half of the chairs around the table are missing parts of the backs.  This table has such a reputation that I actually included it in my book manuscript.

Selfishness because it takes so much internal effort to share my personal space with others.  Worse than my desire to do everything perfectly, is my desire to keep my home to myself. I like quiet.  I like order.  I like schedules. Opening my door makes me feel like I have to let others pry the precious desire for control out of my tightly clenched fists.  My husband always tells me: “control is an illusion.”  He’s right, of course, because any amount of control I think I have is imagined.

But why open the door?  What’s to be gained from inviting people into your home and showing them hospitality by feeding and creating space for them?  Many of us know we should do it, but why?

As a follower of Christ, I go to the Word for directives about how I live my life.  And friend, there’s a lot there about showing hospitality to others. At the bottom of this post, I’ll give you a few passages of Scripture you can refer to if you want more, but for now I’m going to focus on one passage in Romans which says,

“Love must be without hypocrisy. Detest evil; cling to what is good. Show family affection to one another with brotherly love.  Outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lack diligence; be fervent in spirit; serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope; be patient in affliction; be persistent in prayer. Share with the saints in their needs; pursue hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; weep with those who weep. Be in agreement with one another. Do not be proud; instead, associate with the humble. Do not be wise in your own estimation. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Try to do what is honorable in everyone’s eyes. If possible, on your part, live at peace with everyone.”

(Romans 12:9-18, HCSB, emphasis added)

Just prior to these verses, the apostle Paul has catalogued a hefty index of gifts that God has given to the Body of Christ, and he has told us how they should be used.  Different people have different giftings, and we need all the people to use their unique gifts so that the Body can function properly.  I find it so interesting that directly after this, Paul launches into a pragmatic inventory of ways we can love one another. In his list, he gives us some practical, tangible approaches to loving others, and tucked into this description is the phrase “share with the saints in their needs,” followed closely by “pursue hospitality.” How do we do this exactly? How do we pursue hospitality? I think he tells us in a preceding verse: “Show family affection to one another in brotherly love.”

Family affection.

I think maybe this verse has recently been added because I’ve never noticed it before!  I adore the phrase “family affection.” For me, it conjures up images of family dinners around a table, afterhours conversations curled up under blankets on the couch, a close gathering circled up to the fire pit on a chilly night.

But the guest list to these scenes is not limited to my immediate family.  The call to family affection is nestled into a passage that’s describing how to love the Body of Christ—our spiritual family, the Church.  And while I don’t think it’s limited to how we treat Christians (for sure there is a call to love those outside the Church and to love them into our homes with good food and a welcoming atmosphere that give us ground to talk about Christ), but at the very least, we should be opening our homes to our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ—for mutual encouragement, for a way to communicate family affection, and as a venue to comfortably rejoice with those who are rejoicing and feel safe enough to weep with those who weep.

God has been chipping away at my struggle with perfectionism. He’s teaching me to use my gifts right where I’m at with what I’ve got.  And that seems to include my table.  Earlier this year our small group started meeting in our home, but every week I found myself on the edge of internal implosion while trying to finish up my afternoon teaching job and then feverishly fixing a meal that we could quickly swallow and clean up before the folks from church came over for study and prayer. I felt mentally and physically exhausted by the time we opened the front door; I fought to stay focused during the meeting.  And to be completely honest, our conversation didn’t flow the way we wanted it to, sitting formally in a circle of chairs, fidgeting while we avoided eye contact. I wanted to quit because no part of it felt worth the effort of making it happen.

But the Lord prompted me to change things up rather than quit. I needed to alleviate the stress of cooking, eating, and cleaning up while parenting two young children immediately after finishing work for the day—and then juggling bedtime routines after our meeting. After explaining what I was thinking to my husband, we felt there was a way to open up the conversation a bit more, too.  So we decided to try an experiment.

I sent a text to our small group members and told them that rather than showing up at our house after dinner, they should just come FOR dinner. I was making a ton of spaghetti; would they bring some sides? There are 16 of us in our group, and though it gave me minor heart palpitations to think about cooking for this many people every week, I felt the press of the Holy Spirit telling me to trust Him and be obedient by opening my door, my kitchen, my pantry, my heart. So I cooked two pounds of pasta and about two gallons of meat sauce.  Though it burned me a little to do so, I bought paper plates and plastic cups, and somehow on that first night we crammed sixteen people into our dining room around that silly, crooked, beloved table and it was one of the best meetings we’d ever had. We ate and ate, and the conversation flowed with an authenticity we’d been missing. It was messy and loud, and I was sweating from the alarming amount of crumbs and noodles on the floor, but I just considered it a part of my ongoing sanctification; it was good for me. NOBODY CARED ABOUT THE CRUMBS ON THE FLOOR.

With every week that we’ve met, I’ve been letting go a bit more of my need for things to be clean and perfect and orderly.  I don’t fix fancy food.  It’s spaghetti or tacos or a chicken casserole nobody complains about. The teenagers who are sometimes surly and resistant to coming now perk up at the table (and TV trays and card tables…) and talk more than I’ve ever heard them.  We put a basket in the middle of the table and make everyone drop in their phones for the entirety of the evening, an act which I think might actually be physically painful for some of the younger folks.

Hospitality is not my gift, y’all.  It’s an effort for me every time.  About two minutes after the door closes, I pull out my Swiffer and attack the floors with a vengeance. But not having a natural inclination for hosting others doesn’t mean that I can opt out.  If I want to love people, if I want my home to be a hospital for wounded hearts, if I want to encourage conversation and community—and I do! I want all of those things—then I’ve got to learn to love in a way that may not come naturally to me.  If you love Jesus, I don’t think there is an option to opt out of living in faith community.

Learn from my mistakes.  Open your door even if you’re not good at it.  Chances are most people aren’t looking for gourmet food on fine, white china.  They’re not expecting elaborate table settings and glowing candles.  If that’s your thing, then by all means—go all out.  But if it’s not, and if on a scale from 1-10 you’re barely a 1, then don’t shoot to be a 10.  Shoot to be a 3.  There’s room for growth down the road.  For right now, just try to be a 3.  If a meal feels like too much, buy some store-bought cookies and make some coffee. Open your door.  Even if you sweat all night and worry that the food’s not good or the table’s too ugly or the conversation is lagging too often, you still won’t regret creating space for people to feel loved and valued.  It gets easier with time.  It gets deeper and sweeter, and eventually you won’t be so afraid or insecure.

Open the door.

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There are multitudes of examples of the people of God showing kindness and hospitality to others in the Scriptures.  You might consider the book of Acts specifically in that regard.  For further reflection:

*I Peter 4:9 (also comes on the heels of talking about love for one another and using your gifts)

*Hebrews 13:2 (showing hospitality to strangers)

*Matthew 25:35ff (love and care for one another as unto Christ and as a result of saving faith)

For those in church leadership, specifically the office of elder or pastor:

*I Timothy 3:2-4 and Titus 1:7-9