A Few Lessons (and Tips) About Hospitality

I love having people in my home. For almost our entire marriage, my husband and I have regularly hosted large and small groups of people for dinner, prayer, Bible study, cookouts, and parties. We regularly have family or other friends stay overnight with us.

While we’ve primarily been the intiators of such gatherings, we’ve also taken a less active role by simply making our home available to seminary students who need a larger space than their apartment to plan events like a graduation party or small group gathering.

We’ve made it a practice to extend hospitality to others several times a month, often on a weekly basis. Ironically enough, I don’t consider myself to have a particular gift or bent towards hospitality. On paper, my personality isn’t exactly tailor-made for hospitality. However, a deep dive into the “gift” of hospitality is a discussion for another day. For today, suffice it to say I believe that hospitality is more a matter of stewardship than gifting, of nurture rather than nature.

For this reason, I want to offer up some lessons and tips I’ve learned about hospitality. I’ve written about this before, and I still follow most of the list I included in that article. However, I wanted to share an updated list of a few things I’ve learned since.

Nobody needs fancy. If you come to my house, there is a 95% chance we will be eating a burger off paper plates, and I’ve yet to find someone who cares. The only time I dig out real plates is for steak or spaghetti.
Hospitality can be expensive, but it doesn’t have to be. You can cut back on costs by asking people to contribute to the meal with sides or desserts, or do a BYOM (bring your own meat) night to cut back on the most expensive item.
I finally learned that spending 15-20 minutes, three times a week to pick up clutter, dust, vacuum, and clean our bathrooms keeps me from frantic cleaning when we have people coming over.

3a. Related: I stopped worrying about whether every piece of clutter was put away (i.e. thrown into my locked bedroom). I get far too stressed (and grumpy) trying to prepare for people to come over for the sake of making our house look perfect. And, I really don’t want my children to associate hospitality with frustration.
It is easy to have like-minded people over. It is much harder to host people who think and believe differently, mostly because our lives don’t naturally intersect in other spheres and it takes so much more work to schedule it. This is something we are trying to work on.
It’s ok to take a temporary break sometimes. At the end of last year, we paused on the regularity with which we hosted people for the sake of getting my husband through the last push toward his PhD. While we still had people over occasionally, it was with much less frequency. Once he graduated, we returned to more regular rhythms of having people in our home.

5a. Hospitality will look different in different seasons. Right now, we are in a sweet spot where our kids are old enough to be helpful with preparation, understand that they don’t need to drag out a bunch of toys right before people come over, not need my constant attention while I’m prepping dinner, and also not be in nineteen extra-curriculars. This season has allowed us to have people over more regularly and easily than previous times when they were smaller or, I imagine, future seasons when we are busier.

5b. Related, hospitality is habitual. While I can only speculate, because we highly value hospitality and have created this rhythm in our life, I believe that will help us maintain it when life begins to get busier.
We don’t get too fuzzed up about our kids’ schedule (and by “we,” I mean my husband doesn’t get fuzzed up about it and I try really hard not to!). When we have people over, we know our kids are going to go to bed late, even on a school night. Ultimately, we believe the benefits of being present and involved with the people in our home outweigh the chance of them being a little tired the next day.
For a group, coolers with canned drinks and bottled water is easier than trying to pour drinks.
Also for a group, my biggest focus is making sure I have plenty of food. I never want someone to not feel like they couldn’t eat as much as they wanted. I always plan for more people than RSVP and I always do something that can be easily multiplied and/or frozen. That way, if we don’t have enough, we can quickly cook more. Or, more likely, if we make too much, we don’t waste it. Burgers, hot dogs, and pulled pork are my go-to entrees for big groups. I also try to send food home with people as much as possible.