Shaping Hearts – The Ministry of Hospitality

 

Looking back through my life, hospitality has often shaped me.

It was the hospitable table of my grandmother and cousins that welcomed me with hot tea, plates of cookies & endless conversation at a moment’s notice.

It was watching my parents welcome a truckload of hungry teenagers to our apartment with mounds of hot food.

It was 28 girls in an apartment the size of a dorm suite spilling into the hallway to hear the Bible expounded & showing up 45 minutes early if we wanted a seat.

It was 60 people for Christmas Eve dinner or 10 kids for Easter egg coloring or one woman mourning the loss of baby she never saw.

It was in these moments God was changing me.

I learned and continue to learn by watching my parents, grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, Bible study leaders, friends, and people I barely know open their homes to welcome the stranger and the friend.

It is the hospitality of a welcoming face at a church we are visiting that asks us to their home or out to lunch that reminds me we are not in this battle alone.

It is the friend who stops by with food when I’m sick and struggling to get dinner on the table that puts on display the provision and love of our bountiful Savior.

I learn about grace, about love, about valuing the opinions of others and about how to articulate my own.

I learn about forgiveness, empathy, evangelism, beauty, and blessing.

I rejoice with those who come to my home to tell me about the way the Lord has provided.

I weep with those who sit in silence because words can bring no healing.

I laugh around a board game, play “big giant” with small children, drink coffee and eat very sugary treats on my floor while attempting conversation and building Lego towers with my toddler.

Hospitality taught me as a child that my struggles (no matter how small now) had value and were worth discussing; that my triumphs were something to rejoice about; that I could speak with people of any age, ethnicity, background, or life circumstance.

Hospitality taught me that we are all cut from the same proverbial cloth; we all hurt, we all laugh, we all have big questions, we all long for relationships.

I desperately want this for my children. I want my son to value the thoughts, struggles, and opinions of women because he has sat beside them soaking in their situations and listening to their hearts. I want my daughter to value the qualities that make men strong and capable and wise because she has listened to their stories and laughed at their jokes and smiled up at them from their laps.

I fear instead though, that setting out hot cups tea and plates of cookies so we could lose ourselves in conversation has been lost to snapping a photo of that coffee and adorable mug and posting it on social media while scrolling through a newsfeed filled with other like images. I fear that “social media” has replaced and is replacing relationship.

 

I’ll be honest though. If this is something we want, we have to fight for it.

Relationships are hard work. They require time and sacrifice and a willingness to set aside to-do lists and digital distractions. Relationships require that we focus in on the real people that God has placed in front of us.

And this is the beautiful call of the Gospel in the Christian life – to leave all and follow Christ. So we follow Him into the messiness of human relationship where we will bump each other and rub each other the wrong way. But, in doing this, we will see more of the glory of God as He redeems image bearers and draws us to Himself.

Make a decision today, that you will take up arms to fight the isolation and loneliness our culture is pushing on us and press into real relationships as an example to the coming generations and as a means of shaping your own heart and the hearts of those around you.

Open your door and welcome. You will be glad you said “yes.”