I've developed a Pinterest habit during this time of wedding planning and construction. For the uninitiated, Pinterest is a virtual bulletin board where you find beautiful images of wedding inspiration or perfectly curated living spaces and select your favorites for your online vision boards. It’s been helpful for me in choosing cabinets and centerpieces, but there's a danger in these picture-perfect parties and museum-exhibit houses: there's no room for hospitality.
These images can inform our ideas of what "should be" if we aren't careful. The reality of hospitality is that we must be willing to wait up with the Lord in the Garden. Like the women of Jerusalem greeting Christ on the road to the Cross, we must be willing to offer our presence in times of sorrow as well as at dinner parties. Hosting involves appetizers, a well-laid table, and invitations; hospitality does not wait on these formalities.
I've been reflecting on my parents' example; I am one of three kids, but one of nearly thirty first cousins on my dad's side. As a child, my cousins would spend a week at a time at our house in the summer, and those weeks built relationships that continue into our adulthoods.
As we picture not the kitchen we want to build but the life we want to live in it, the comfort of those summers surface in my imagination. Hospitality is found in our daily bread, in the humility of inviting those we love into the mess of a kitchen on a weeknight, in the closeness of Our Father knowing our needs before we voice them.
