Warm Heart, Cold Feet
When pastor Zack informed us at the Village Church that we’d be studying hospitality in 2020 and that this topic came with a required reading book, I wanted to bounce up and down at my spot on the church’s antique pews like my toddler does when I tell him he can have a handful of raisins.
If you told me 15 years ago that I would be passionate about hospitality today, I never would have believed you. I grew up in a family that cherished addictions and dysfunction over people, so it was rare when my parent’s actions could be defined as “hospitable.”
The only examples of hospitality I had seen, right up to my late 20s, were what others had shown to me. I had a hard time committing to full-time college when I was younger and an even harder time financially living on the beautiful but highly expensive central California coast. I ended up changing jobs or living situations almost yearly, never actually graduating college and never, ever having enough money. I have lost count of how many times my stable, married friends let me live at their house for a week or three because I had nowhere else to go. Or how many times my friends’ parents took pity on me and covered my rent. I always knew that any hospitality I ever received was from God and represented His care towards me. At certain points, the perfectly timed generosity of others was all I had.
Because of this, years of this, I swore to myself that if I ever had a home and resources to share with others, I would.
When I had been Ian’s wife for a year, we moved from California to the town he grew up in, near Seattle. He had been offered a rare, late-recession architecture job in Bremerton and he eagerly took it. This meant we would be living closer to his mom and step-dad who lived in a huge house right next to the Puget Sound. Next to, as in, they literally had their own beach.
Ian’s mom, Barb, is basically Martha Stewart without the prison record: perfectly ordered and sensibly decorated house, unparalleled cooking skills, gentleness and kindness, everything in its place.
Barb invited us over for dinner once a month or so the first few years we lived there. The minute we walked in the door, her husband, Charley, would simultaneously take our coats, put a glass of wine in our hands (whether we wanted one or not) and lead us over to the living room four feet away where Barb’s sundry appetizers took up the entire coffee table. Appetizers as a section of consumables, fell under the “you’re too poor to order these at a restaurant, so don’t” tab in my brain, yet here I was coatless, glass of wine, appetizer buffet.
“What did you make tonite, Mom?” Ian would ask, completely at home in this pleasant opulence that he grew up in.
“Some lamb,” she’d say casually. “And we had extra salmon in the freezer that Charley caught last year so I made some of that too. In case we didn’t have enough food.”
Meanwhile, Charley is monitoring the status of our wine glasses like a sonar tech in a Navy submarine.
“You want more wine, Cas? Come on Ian: more wine?” He’d say when he saw the liquid level dip below the curve of the wine glass. “I’ve got two open bottles ready to go!”
If you come to my house expecting salmon and lamb and endless wine, I’ll probably disappoint you. My husband and I practice what I call “budget hospitality.” But I mention Barb and Charley because I learned so much from them about how to treat someone who enters my home. Their extravagant dinners were an expression of their extravagant love and care. It wasn’t opulence that made having dinner at their house special; it was their heart of service and how they made us feel confident they were happy to have us there. They made us believe we were not a burden, but instead participants in their joy. A joy that would exist whether we came or not, but since we came, was made all the richer. This can be conveyed by an expensive feast or by the simplest faire, or by something as simple and affordable as a “cup of cold water.” (Mat 10:42).
The best and easiest way to show this love and care is to ignore any weird pressures around hospitality and simply be yourself in front of the people who find themselves in your space. Alison Roman put it this way in her cookbook Nothing Fancy, “Embrace the quirky imperfections that make dinner at your house special and different (p11).”
This is hard to do if you aren’t accustomed to it. It takes a willingness to get over some things, namely yourself and your means. But if you are willing to practice, you can overcome the tension you feel when people show up at the door, which will leave you free to relax and enjoy people.
For some people, the hesitation to be hospitable is not because they feel like their house or their stuff or their cooking won’t measure up, but because it’s hard to let go of control. It’s a fear of the unknown. What if these invited people are awkward to talk to? What if they smell? What if they decide they don’t like us? What if I say the wrong thing and look stupid? This sounds like the same mode of thinking we all used to live by in junior high. Fear becomes the self-preservation excuse not to bother with the mild “risk” of letting people into our homes and lives.
Who cares what people think about you or your cooking or your thrift store furniture, Christ follower? When a person is under our roof, it is our job to show him or her simple love and care straight from the heart of the God we serve and that’s it. It’s a lot easier to be hospitable to people when you aren’t concerned about how you look in the process. The fear of the opinions of others really is a dangerous distraction (Proverbs 29:25).
When you are the one invited to someone’s house, do you run your finger along their bookshelves, judging their dusting job? Or are you checking the corners of the kitchen floor to see if your host swept before you got there? No, right? Because that would be shallow and creepy. You are focused instead on the people in front of you. And have you noticed that if your hosts are relaxed and appreciate your presence, how much easier it is to relax and appreciate them?
Being able to slow down and be present with people in the name of God with the love of God is SUCH a powerful thing. When I read the gospels, Jesus seems so chill around people and so Himself at all times. He chose to be unaffected by social pressures that didn’t line up with His Father’s will. Because of this, Jesus never needed to please or pander to anyone. He was confident that God was pleased with Him, and that was all that mattered (John 13:3). Regular people, especially the most judged and those who lived on the fringe, could sense this. They were drawn to Him and felt they could drop their guard around Him long enough for their lives to change.
I am only one chapter into Rosario Butterfield’s hospitality book while I write this, so I can’t speak on her work just yet (although the preface and first chapter have pumped me up), but I found a definition of biblical hospitality that I love. It is:
“The welcoming and fellowshipping with believers and non-believers out of truth and love for Jesus Christ so that they may see Christ more clearly and/or so they will join us as exiles themselves (or join us as believers).”
My own personal definition?
Using your stuff to show people the heart of God.
Viewing the visible as a tool to teach about the invisible.
Letting the temporal fold up into an origami arrow that points up to the eternal.
This doesn’t need to be extreme. You don’t need to find every homeless person wandering around South Columbus and let them take up lodgings in your basement (unless God explicitly tells you to do this). It’s better to start small. Start by inviting people over at all. People you know. Make a habit of it. Once a week or every other week. Then, once you get the hang of it, move on to people you only kinda know, or someone who is really different than you. Then try asking someone in your life who would fall under the “acquaintance” category. “Jerusalem, Judaea, Samaria,” the risen Lord said in Acts 1:8, which simply means move in concentric circles around your immediate sphere of influence.
It’s all just practice and obedience.
The reason I am addicted to the practice of hospitality is because it's so simple and accomplishes so much. It is a perfect give and take: a convergence of so many spiritual disciplines like patience, selflessness, evangelism and service. It not only blesses and changes others, but I am blessed and changed as I learn to let go of perfectionism in exchange for an edge-of-my-seat expectation of what God will do when I open my imperfect heart and imperfect home to others.
Plus, it’s as fun as you make it. Who doesn’t like a party?
I refuse to let such important moments of God’s strength displayed through my weakness drift by without the tiny bit of adventurous recklessness it takes to reach out to them.
And there are a lot of “them” to reach out to. So many opportunities. So many precious people.
So, beloved and led of Christ, reach out for them.