Hospitality

“I can’t take Allen,” my friend texted me on a Thursday morning. “I’m so sorry; I have Covid.”

My stomach clenched. The week was already more than I could handle, with all three of my grown children visiting at the same time and welcoming a new international student, Jared, from China the day before.

That day we also had a wedding. Our second student, Tanner, from South Korea, was flying in during the wedding. (Our daughter was picking him up.) There had been a flurry of laundry, beds made, and rooms swept. Tanner, at least, was in his second year with us; he knew the ropes. Jared, however, had to be taught everything, from where to find cups to how to use our shower. And now we would be hosting a third student that very night because he had nowhere else to go.

Allen, from China, had been with us last year. But where would he sleep? All the beds were taken. And who would pick him up at the airport at 1 a.m.? All my carefully laid plans were scattered. This was not just hospitality; this was “gritty hospitality.”

When Pastor Peter Jonker, of LaGrave Avenue CRC, had spoken at a meeting of host parents to international students, he had said hospitality was connected to the word for “hospital.” It was a healing art, different from entertaining.

The word “hospitality” in the Bible is a translation from the Greek word philoxenia, a compound word meaning love (philo) of strangers and foreigners (xenia). He encouraged us as host parents to “practice the craft of love” as we cared for these students from faraway lands. “How do people feel when they are in your home?” he asked. “Do they feel accepted, encouraged, and cared for?”

Hospitality is about “creating a space where people can let their hair down and be themselves,” he said. “Sometimes the less fancy it is, the more hospitable. It’s where vulnerabilities are shared instead of strengths.”

The biggest takeaway: practising the “craft of love” could be “gritty,” hard, and costly. That very night, we were also dealing with a potentially serious crisis of a 15-year-old international student in our home. These situations and others over the years had thrown grit into the gears of our household machine, our lives.

As we’ve latched onto “gritty” as our word for all the “situations,” we’ve also clung to the grace and wisdom God gives us to grow in love for the “strangers” he has brought to us. If God’s assignment is God’s enablement, we have been equipped countless times.

According to Scripture, hospitality is not optional. Love of strangers could be anyone: a widow or an orphan, a refugee or immigrant, a foster child, a disabled person, a neighbor, or an unhoused person. Hospitality doesn’t even have to take place in your home. As Jonker said, it is not just a place but a “quality of spirit.” How can we all extend a more welcoming and generous spirit to those we meet, whether on the street, in the workplace, or in our homes?

Allen slept that night on a camping cot, bunking with his former host brother, Tanner. He brought me a beautiful bracelet from China and gave me a big hug. He stayed with us for two days until we drove him to Michigan State University for his freshman year.

As they say, it’s not the size of your house but the space in your heart. Thankfully, God always increases our limited capacity for welcome. Despite a regular dusting of hospitality grit, day by day we are stretching and growing in the costly but necessary craft of love.