Thanksgiving and Hospitality

We love to have people in our home and especially during the holidays.  The only down side of it all is getting the house “ready” for company.  This means, doing laundry, cleaning bedrooms, putting on clean sheets, cleaning bathrooms and worst of all scrubbing hard wood floors.  It always amazes me that we work and work to get the house ready and once our company arrives we begin to “mess” it up again.  I would love to tell you that our house is always ‘ready’ for friends and family but of course that could  not be further from the truth.  So why is it we feel the need to get things ready for those we call family?

I think we could come up with a number of reasons why we get things ready but I want to consider something a little different.  What about the “drop-in” (any Seinfeld fans out there?)?   How do you feel when people come by your house unexpectedly and come in to see your house for what it really is, a mess?  Or how do you feel when you are the one dropping in and you find your friends house to be a little on messy side?  Let me be honest for a second.  I love a clean house and I love the way it makes me feel, like my life is put together all nice and neat, but the fact is my life, nor my house, is always put together nice and neat.  At times it is very messy (both life and house) and I find myself looking for something?.?  What?  Someone to share this place of messiness with me, someone who will not judge me for what my house looks like or my life.  Someone that comes along side me to feel the burden of the mess.

I have been a dropper-inner myself a few times and I usually love what I see.  A somewhat messy house that I feel right at home in (with exception of a couple friends i.e. Van Drunen’s and Bynum’s).  There have been times where I have been on the phone with a friend and they ask  ”Well, do you want to come over?” I’m am immediately struck by the intimacy in the invitation. Into their home, with no prior planning, to share some coffee and have a conversation face to face. I note that we spend an entire day getting our house “ready for company” – clean, presentable, putting on a good show. But these friends are inviting me into their life, as it is, right now.

As I type this I wonder. I wonder about this ‘open hearted as-you-are hospitality’, in contrast to our “are the bathrooms sparkling” worrisome way.  Different than Biblical times, we don’t wash each others’ feet upon entering any longer – thank God!  – so instead we clean the bathroom. But that’s not really hospitality; hospitality is being with the other.  Being with each other in the mess of life and inviting others into our lives as they are and entering into the lives of others as they are.  So to all my friends and family I just want to say, don’t clean your house for us and we won’t clean our house for you.  Just come over and we will share in the place of messiness and do life together as it should be done!

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