i read a blog post today and LOVED the title and the message (and i certainly needed the reminder)...
“your house is only as big as your hospitality”.
if i want our house to seem big, it is entirely up to me. to make it larger, to extend it, just invite a lot of people into it. my house is as large as my heart. as large as the spirit that inhabits it.
the house always feels smaller at Christmas. getting a tree and the other Christmas decor in seems to take up any extra space. but that isn’t what makes a house big or small really. it is the availability of the people inside to lay aside their desires to have a neat, orderly existence and invite in a little dirty, messy chaos of a world that needs to see hospitality in action. i love the IDEA of hospitality more than i love the nitty gritty work of it. the cleaning. the cooking. the cleaning up. we have not been very hospitable as of the last few months. and we are better when our hearts are stretched.
and since i want to be a radical, i liked this quote about radical hospitality...
"When we relate to a difficult person, we operate from a basic assumption: I need to protect myself.
But to live the way of hospitality means extending grace to people.
You cannot be hospitable and gracious from behind your high wall.
If you live by grace you become helpful.
You become accepting.
Even when it is impossible to accept certain behaviors and impossible to like them, you accept them.
The centrality of love insists that we give the hard-to-like a chance. "
~ Radical Hospitality, Homan and Pratt
we hosted a little “end of finals” party for maxx and some of his friends tonight. our “not so veiled” purpose was to meet some of his friends and their parents (the ones we hadn’t met yet). and it was “not so veiled” because this is what the invitations said...
i know... we are nothing if not obvious. but the good news was that they fell for it... ha. we had a dozen kids show up and we had half of their parents come in and meet us. share a cup of coffee frappe or hot chocolate with us and chat for a while. and they were so THRILLED that they had been invited in. and some even called the idea “brilliant”. those will be maxx’s new best friends.
they had a lot of fun. ate a lot of food. spilled a lot of hot chocolate in the playroom. and no one cared. who cares about a spill when you have such a BIG house full of happy laughing kids?
and here was my view of them most of the night. that kitchen window is soooooo handy looking into the playroom. go and clean a dish, see what everyone is doing. get a drink from the hot chocolate bar, listen in for a minute. though it think maxx’s friend, ella, was on to me. look at her looking as i took a photo. oh well, you can’t fool them all ALL of the time. i am a stalker and i guess the earlier they accept it, the better for us all in the long run. sorry... well, not really.
