Opening Your Heart Is Just as Important as Opening Your Home
“Opening your heart is just as important as opening your home,” a friend reminds me as we chat on the phone.
I stare out the window as stratus clouds linger low over the valley.
This morning, I invited the neighbors to join our family for an evening of fishing at the creek.
Now, as it threatens to rain, I wonder if I’ve made a mistake.
I wanted our outing to be perfect. As I watch the clouds gather, my friend reminds me that hospitality isn’t about perfection. It’s about opening our hearts to others.
I thank her, put down the phone, and begin packing for our evening at the creek.
Opening Your Heart
We make it to the creek with just over two hours of daylight remaining. A cold front has blown in, but the kids don’t care.
Darrell starts the fire, and I lay our spread of hotdogs and snacks on a washed-up sycamore log along the creek bank.
In his 3-year-old-ness, Caleb immediately drops the package of hotdogs, and tiny pieces of dirt stick to the pale meat. Imperfect hospitality indeed.
Our friends arrive twenty minutes later, and we take turns untangling the fishing lines, cooking marshmallows, and rescuing the youngest neighbor boy as he plunges into the water after minnows.
It’s not at all relaxing.
It’s messy.
The outing is harder than it would have been if we hadn’t invited our friends.
However, as we sit along the creek together, I wouldn’t change it for the world. We are sharing something we love with people we care about. We’ve invited them into our messy lives with our dirty hotdogs and muddy feet.
We sit around the fire and talk about work, sick kids, and where we feel like we’re failing in life. There’s something so gritty and real about the whole thing that I feel like we’re forming one of those bonds that can’t be broken by time or distance.
Opening Your Heart Can Happen Anywhere
This is what happens when we create spaces where others know they belong.
They see us as our truest selves. In response, they know they are free to be their truest selves as well.
There are no masks, and we stop pretending our lives are perfect. We parent imperfectly together and don’t hide the fact that we accidentally yell at our kids more often than we like to admit. We show up without all the answers and invite others to watch us, even as we struggle.
~~~
Our evening at the creek lasts until darkness settles.
When we arrive home, I unpack our dirty food while Darrell scrubs dirty children in the bathtub.
They go to bed an hour later than usual, and we’re all exhausted. However, something special has happened. We messed up our schedule and our lives for the sake of loving others. Maybe we need to do this just a little more often.
Perhaps it’s okay to stay up an hour later on Friday night and skip bath time Saturday. Maybe it’s okay to share an imperfect meal and talk about our imperfect lives. Opening our hearts to others creates a powerful platform for ministering to their needs.
I’ve been thinking about hospitality often this spring, and here are a few of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned:
1. Opening your heart creates safe spaces where others know they belong.
This can happen in our homes, but it can happen on street corners, in coffee shops, in office cubicles, or anywhere at all.
Opening your heart is the act of creating a safe space where others know they belong. #hospitality #Biblicalhospitality Share on X2. Hospitality isn’t meant to be a discipline we occasionally practice.
A hospitable heart is constantly watching for needs: for sadness behind the smile of the waiter at the restaurant, for loneliness beneath the façade of a seemingly confident coworker, for whatever is true beneath the masks of those who try so hard to hide.
A hospitable heart waits to make space for the hurting to take off their masks.
3. When you practice opening your heart to others, you create safe spaces.
When people feel safe, they open their hearts.
Open hearts create lasting bonds, and from these bonds, God offers opportunities to share our hope in Christ.
Hospitality becomes a place where we share our faith.
4. You don’t need to be perfect to practice opening your heart or your home.
In fact, people feel more comfortable with us when we live openly with our imperfections and admit that we don’t have all the answers.
5. When others feel safe with us, they are receptive to our words.
This can be a powerful platform for sharing our hope in Christ.
When we create spaces where others know they belong, we embrace them as they are.
We share the broken pieces of our own stories and listen to the broken parts of theirs. We create a foundation that is like a footpath leading straight to the heart of Christ. This is living the gospel.
6. We extend hospitality because God first offered it to us.
John Piper offers powerful words about God’s hospitality:
“The ultimate act of hospitality was when Jesus Christ died for sinners to make everyone who believes a member of the household of God. We are no longer strangers and sojourners. We have come home to God. Everybody who trusts in Jesus finds a home in God.”
As our family aims to live with open hearts, we embrace the fact that this requires effort, but we are richly blessed in the process.
A Free Guide to Help You Practice Hospitality
For a free toolkit of practical ways to extend hospitality in your life, click here to receive your free download: Hospitality without Perfection. The kit includes twenty easy ways to extend hospitality, games, activities, recipes, conversation starters, and more.
These books are free on Kindle Unlimited or available to purchase in print:
God wants to work in your life to accomplish what you’ve been unable to do through willpower alone. Lean Into Grace: Let God’s Grace Heal Your Heart, Refresh Your Soul, and Set You Free shares practical ways to experience God’s freedom, healing, power, and presence in your life. Find this life-changing book as a free eBook on Kindle Unlimited or for 12.99 in print right here. (If you do not have Kindle Unlimited, you can try it out with a free three-month trial!) This book will transform your life and revitalize your relationship with the Lord!
Calling all moms and daughters!
Additionally, my teen daughter, Bekah, and I are passionate about helping moms and daughters grow closer while connecting with God. We have written two mother-daughter devotionals together. Girl to Girl: 60 Mother-Daughter Devotions for a Closer Relationship and Deeper Faith is written for girls ages 7-12. It includes 60 devotions with Scripture, conversation starters, and a shared journaling section after each devotion.
Heart to Heart: A Mother-Daughter Devotional With 50 Devotions for Teen Girls is for teenage girls ages 13-20. It includes 50 devotions, each with a shared journaling section to help moms and daughters connect through writing. This is a great book for moms who want to communicate about awkward topics—like dating, purity, peer pressure, and more—but don’t know where to start. We will help you!
Multitudes of mothers, daughters, mentors, and younger women are being transformed by these books! You can buy them as paperbacks or get your free Kindle Unlimited eBooks on Amazon right here.
Resource: https://www.desiringgod.org/messages/strategic-hospitality
Thanks to Emily P. Freeman for the encouragement to reflect on lessons from this spring! I normally post every Wednesday, but this week’s bonus Tuesday post is in honor of Emily and her appreciation for simple Tuesdays.
