The Gospel-Heart of Hospitality
March 24th, 2022 • by Elizabeth Santelmann
We live in a world that values performative hospitality. Magazine spreads show beautifully-laid tables with place cards and breathtaking floral arrangements. We see influencers with living rooms full of luxurious pillows, vacuumed floors, and art hung by interior designers, making us immediately insecure about our toy-scattered floors and smeared windows.
We know the Bible calls us to “offer hospitality without grumbling,” (1 Peter 4:9), but we look around our own house and it’s a far cry from a magazine spread. From where I sit, the coffee table has been leaned against the wall to make room for an inside workout, my husband’s at-home work equipment is piled on our buffet, and the floors are covered with a variety of blankies, toys, and leftover Christmas ornaments. How do I follow the encouragement to offer hospitality when my reality looks so messy? I cringe to think of anyone seeing my house in this state.
Yet at the same time I feel the pull to invite others into the honest reality of my life.
Embracing the Mess
As a young mom, I was incredibly lonely. I had moved to Oklahoma City the year before and didn’t know many people. My days were spent caring for my little one. I longed to be invited into the homes of other women, but the invites never came. I wanted to invite people over, but my house was never quite right. If we did invite people over, I spent two to three hours before they arrived yelling directions at my husband, leaving us both tense and miserable by the time the guests arrived. The work and stress it took to invite people over meant it didn’t happen often.
Sometime in the second year, I was introduced to the concept of inviting people into the mess. My older sister looked me in the eyes one day and said, “Everyone wants to know that their mess is normal. Just invite people into the mess.”
I was shocked and appalled at first. What would people think if they saw the full reality of my dirty floors and cheerio-filled couch cushions? But as the days of loneliness continued, I became desperate enough to try it. I invited a friend I had been getting close to over on *gasp* Monday (my biggest laundry day). I picked the worst day of the house on purpose so I could excuse it as my laundry day and justify it as “as bad as it gets.”
My friend wasn’t shocked, she wasn’t horrified, and to my amazement, she wanted to come back the next week. We munched sandwiches, and the vulnerability of my dirty house bonded us together even more. For the next few months, we maintained this routine, and I gradually became desensitized to the discomfort of someone observing my daily life.
“How do I follow the encouragement to offer hospitality when my reality looks so messy?”
A Call to Radical Hospitality
There are times that call for making the home a little more special. I’ve hosted a Mom’s Night book club in my home many times. During that time, I try to make sure the living room is clean, a candle is lit, and a treat is waiting for the tired moms to gather. In those moments I want my home to be a refuge to women who have battled long days of toddlers, tantrums, and cleaning their own homes. I want to offer myself and our home as a haven of rest.
In “The Gospel Comes with a Housekey,” author Rosaria Butterfield calls us to radical hospitality, but to many of us the idea of that amount of flexibility in hospitality is more than what we can imagine. It’s like jetting around on a motorcycle when we haven’t learned to ride a bike. But what I hope you will do after reading this is to strap on your bike helmet, get on your tricycle, and start to practice the routine of hospitality with me.
Hospitality really is something that must be practiced. I notice that even if I step away from hospitality for a little bit, it becomes harder to do even the basics. It’s not an activity that you put on and take off at will. It’s a way of life you must cultivate and grow in. You must stretch and learn to open yourself up and let people in.
“Hospitality really is something that must be practiced. It’s a way of life you must cultivate and grow in. ”
Practical Tips for Growing in Hospitality
So how do you get started?
Pray and ask God to give you a heart for hospitality
I know this sounds cliché, but without seeing the benefits of hospitality to yourself and to the church, you will never put yourself through the discomfort of the process. We as humans are designed to live in community. Our modern world has allowed us more and more to be separate from one another and to be “independent,” but if the last two years have taught us anything, it is that we need one another (Titus 1:8).
Follow people from your community on social media
This simple step will allow you to begin to see the interests of the people around you. It will give you topics to discuss and conversation pitfalls to avoid. Overall, I have found it to give me more confidence in conversation with others. But please, please don’t stop there (Philippians 2:4).
Decide who you will host!
Often, we enter a community and there is a group of people with whom we want to be friends. They are often the people already connected with one another. They look like they’re having fun, and jealousy makes us want to have fun with them. What I encourage you to do is to look for someone who’s not part of that group. Someone on the edges. Rather than practicing hospitality for what you can get out of it, this shifts your perspective to offering it as a gift. Even with that attitude, we know that giving blesses the giver even more than the receiver. The friendships built with the people you welcome into your home will inevitably bless you in the process (Luke 14:12-14).
Prepare for the visit
We’ve already covered things that don’t need to be perfect, but decide if you plan to serve food or if you need to be able to sit on the couch. Prepare with as much energy you can expend comfortably. Remember the goal is to create a sustainable pattern to create a lifestyle of hospitality. If you’re a planner, make a checklist of things you want to do every time before a guest comes.
I’m a huge fan of The Lazy Genius, who talks about keeping it simple and “deciding once” what the food will be. Keep popsicles on hand in the freezer or serve an easy chicken sheet pan dinner (or frozen lasagna). When we wanted to start hosting after church, I was worried people would notice that I cooked and served the same food every Sunday. But then it dawned on me that we rarely had the same people over, and if we did have someone back it was a couple of months later. At that point repeating food wasn’t going to be a problem.
Roll with it
There is nothing more uncomfortable than a hostess pointing out all the flaws of her house or the minuscule amount of over or under-salting that happened. Don’t complain about your house, and don’t apologize for the food or criticize yourself as a hostess. If you are gracious and generous to yourself and others, then your guests will enjoy themselves even more (Philippians 2:3-4).
We are called to live as a reflection of Jesus and to see people the way Jesus saw them. People have value because they reflect the image of the God who created them. We’ve all seen hurtful things, experienced pain, and felt the “spatter” of sin. But as we use the power God gives us to love, we can together with our communities learn to see him and his grace more fully in and through one another.
Elizabeth Santelmann is a homeschooling mother of three small boys. She loves reading and always has a large stack of books by her bed. She enjoys seeking beauty by taking photographs. And she started combining her photos with writing on Instagram. Her hope is to share what she is learning about gently nurturing and guiding our children toward the gospel with our lives and speech. Before marriage she worked for 4 years in children’s ministry. She has attended Heritage Presbyterian Church with her husband for the last 10 years. The past three years she has loved using what she learned about reformed theology and children’s ministry to write Bible lessons for her church’s VBS. You can find more from Elizabeth here!
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