Daily Devotional: Hospitality (Day 6)

“I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face.”

As children, getting an invitation to a friend’s birthday party is so exciting. Even as adults, we enjoy being invited for dinner or to a movie with a friend. We all want to be included. The next letter in our word hospitality is “I” and today is all about inviting.

What does it take for you to invite someone into your home? For me, it involves frantic cleaning and preparation to the point of exhaustion and then I often do not enjoy the time with my friends as I am so worried about the food or the drinks etc. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Hospitality is not the same as entertaining. True hospitality is about opening our lives and sharing who we are and is far more important than what we bake or how clean our house is. It all starts with inviting people to join us. It should be more about the people and less about the presentation.

Inviting someone to spend time with you can involve sharing a cup of coffee at Starbucks or sitting on a bench at the park just to talk. It doesn’t have to be anything formal. By extending an invitation to them, we become, in a sense, a “living love letter” from God. When we ask someone to sit with us, we are inviting them to belong… to share their story and, in turn, to become a part of God’s love story.

“It doesn’t matter if our floors are made of marble or mud. What matters is the way we smile and wave guests inside, the way we lean into the conversation like it’s exactly where we want to be. Hospitality is not about impressing our guests, but embracing them. It is opening our arms as wide as Jesus did.” (Rachel Goode- editor of Full and Well magazine)

And it starts with an invitation.