How to be welcoming when you don’t enjoy hospitality

How to be welcoming when you don’t enjoy hospitality

Hospitality is my jam. It brings me great delight to host people in our home, and seeing people relax and be restored is a gift to my spirit. Usually.

Sometimes, even though we want to be hospitable?  We feel unequipped, uninspired and just plain unwelcoming.

I’ll share a story with you. Once I planned a lovely fall tea party for a group of ladies I adore. Normally this would be a highlight of my season, and preparing wouldn’t be an issue.

Life doesn’t always include margin for what we normally prefer though, right?

Although my intention was good, to bless busy friends with a beautiful time of peace and fellowship, my heart was overwhelmed. Resentful.

It became painfully clear that I had, once again, set my expectations too high.

Lofty visions of my children joyfully helping me in the kitchen. Oh, we’d laugh and playfully prepare for guests. The guests would all make time in their overburdened calendars to come relax. Every food item would be beautiful and delicious. Hmmm, um, yeah. That is not what happened at all.

Can I be really honest here? I am a master at casting dreams of perfect events. I am a work in progress, however, at coping when reality steps in and alters my carefully laid plans.

What does it mean to practice hospitality?

Pinterest doesn’t always equal hospitality. C’mon, can you relate to trying to create a Pinterest-perfect gathering without leaving any margin or room for “life” to trip us up? I sure am. These are just a FEW of the things that put me into the insanity mentality:

• I always forget I have a chronic illness. My lofty plans didn’t allow for it, yet it reared its unpredictable head
• 2 teens, 1 mom. With mood swings
• I reacted irritably with grumpy teens. Not my shining parental moment
• There was a defeating sense of (misplaced) disappointment in my kids. Hadn’t I trained them their entire lives to serve not as an obligation but an opportunity? I felt like I had failed
• My husband was out of town. This left me the sole driver for the kids, (and provider of all their needs) with a  5 hour stretch of overlapping classes around town the night before
• The weather turned hot. Not cozy for an afternoon tea
• I was saddened by the reality is that women are often really, really overscheduled. Feeling unable to take  a two-hour break to refresh themselves amidst raising children. The truth was, wrong or right, it hurt my feelings to have anyone cancel that day after such a hot mess of a week. The thing is, that didn’t take into account THEIR own hot messes
• A heavy unexpected emotional journey was required the week leading up to the party. I was tapped out
• I was drawn in by too many beautiful pictures of new recipes, attempting to make most of them. Everything that could go wrong seemed to. The night before the party at 11 pm I was still baking, the house was a mess, and I strongly resembled the chef on the Muppets, tossing things into the air, creating a disaster zone
• Lastly, before I fell into bed? -I looked in the mirror to see my face had broken out. Really?

What does the bible say about hospitality?

12 hours until guests and so much to do. How timely that I was reading the story of Martha and Mary. I have always felt like poor Martha got a bad rap. Mary was sitting at the feet of Jesus, sure, doing the “one thing”.

We forget that this was a culture where women worked to prepare these feasts; she must have felt she didn’t have an option. In this culture, hospitality was expected. What was she to do?

What Martha had to learn, and so did I,  hospitality extends further than our hands; they must work in unison with our heart.

It is difficult to keep our eyes focused on Jesus when things get ramped up.

After we check off one task, there are 28 others, vying with the same pressing sense of urgency. I don’t want to live that way. I want to welcome people with a peaceful heart, a sincere gratitude for the chance to serve them.

1 Peter 4:9 tells us to offer hospitality to each other without grumbling or complaint. That is pretty near impossible when we start feeling put out by our very own efforts to be hospitable!

How do you practice hospitality at home when you are stressed out?

To welcome people with peace in the future requires thoughtful, realistic goals:

• Ask for help– I can plan well, but physically need help in execution. That is my reality. And that is ok, to ask for help. It makes other people feel good about contributing, it relieves our burden
• Keep it simple-It would be better to stick to a menu that is simple, attainable, and not change the plan at 8 pm the night before. Overachievement is not worth the physical toll on  body and spirit
• An extension of grace will be required. For others, to ourselves. If things don’t go as planned, if our mood is as far from bright as we imagine possible, beating ourselves up doesn’t help the situation. Be forgiving, as we are all learning as we go

How to show Christian hospitality

The bottom line is that I get grumpy because of the letdown that follows fantastical expectations.

While it is good to have a large visual plan to work with, useful to have detailed plans, they are just ideas. People are more important than those ideas.

I didn’t see this about to derail, but Satan did. He knew my propensity to plan big, and my crushing disappointment when I could not live up to my own standards.

He put another stick in my spokes. And another. Until I could not pedal and crashed.

The beauty of that kind of fall, is that God’s arms were waiting to catch me. They always are.

He whispers gently into my ear, “Slow down. I am pleased that you wanted to bless people in my name. I am not pleased when your efforts steal your focus away from me. Slow down and see me, keep your eyes on me. Then, we’ll do this together.”

Hospitality is an opportunity to say welcome

Martha was missing the point in that long ago household. She saw the tasks and forgot the guest.  No wonder it was so easy for me to see her point of view. It came naturally to me. Mary chose the one thing, and I want to do that too. To serve with my hands and heart.

To do that, I need to keep my eyes turned steadily onto the path God has laid out for me.

We all do, hospitality is a good thing, even when we don’t feel that it is our gift our even our desire.

The not-so-secret solution to hospitality is simply to let go of what we imagine to be the perfect offering.  It is enough to just open the door and say welcome.

That is all people really need.

So my party? I wish I could say I was the most gracious host, pulling everything around in the end. I wasn’t, I didn’t.  They didn’t notice and seemed to have a wonderful time, but unfortunately, my disappointment ruined it for me.

The good news is that “next” time can always be different.

Expecting less will allow me, and my guests, to enjoy our time without any undercurrents of frustration. That is where the joy lies, which is the true gift. A place and moment to connect, to serve… without expectations.

Great hospitality resources:

• Extraordinary Hospitality for Ordinary Christians: A Radical Approach to Preparing Your Heart & Home for Gospel-Centered Community
• The Lost Art of Hospitality: Making People Feel Welcome in Your Home 
• Just Open the Door – Bible Study Book: A Study of Biblical Hospitality
• The Pioneer Woman Cooks―Super Easy!
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