Practicing Hospitality Imperfectly

One of the seven values of our home is the practice (that is the making mistakes along the way of learning) of hospitality. When we practice hospitality instead as entertainment, that is, the act of amusing or performing for our guests, we miss a very important quality in the intended expression: the administration of care to brokenness, the being of a hospital

Of the making of Pinterest boards and Hygge books and shiplapped magazines there is no lack, but what does it mean to be a hospital at the dinner table or over coffee or in the doing of daily tasks around the house? How is doing laundry or washing dishes or having difficult conversations or listening an act of hospitality in a culture that wines and dines and lauds the farm to table spread in an autumn cornfield at dusk? When these latter expressions are the pièce de résistance, the thing we think of when we think of hospitality, how does the mere folding of socks, packing of lunches, and being seen with your hair undone express a better hospitality? 

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These are the questions that have rattled around in me for the entirety of my life. From my earliest memories, I have been surrounded by the earthly, simple, practical act of hospitality. For years of my teens we had three different families living with us in our home, giving over entire floors of our house to them, siblings squished in bedrooms, dinners rowdy affairs. I don't want to paint those experiences as perfect, they were, without doubt, some of the most difficult of my teen years (and, I'd venture, for the adults as well), but they happened. The sharing of resources and home and opinions and reputations was commonplace in our home. Some of the most painful memories of my life happened in those spaces and others, where our family was meshed with another family, imperfectly but still done. The option for a closed door was never one considered. This way of life felt natural to me, still feels natural to me, although I am learning it carries dysfunction in me too: a belief that saying "no" is not an option. This is why I am still learning to practice hospitality and not perfect it.   

How does one practice hospitality, the being a hospital, and yet also confess they are not the Great Physician and there are some maladies even a good soup and hearty homemade bread cannot fix? I do not have the answer to this question, though it seems like it should be easy, but here is how we generally think about our home and hospitality: 

We can only give what we can give. If we do not have it, we cannot give it. If we cannot give it, we cannot give it. But Christ can and so sometimes the best act of hospitality is to say: I cannot, but he can. To administer the grace which says, "We do not have what you need to become better. But we do have Christ." 

We sometimes must let things be awkward. If every space in an evening or a life must be filled with small talk or inventions of stories, there is no space for the awkward growing pains of maturity to stretch. Being quiet for longer than the noted beat of acceptable silence reminds us in sometimes painful ways that not all is resolved yet, that we are still in process, and in need. Most of us ramble to fill that space and in doing so we crowd out the small voice of the Spirit who may want to move the conversation in another direction entirely. Part of true hospitality is times of quiet, sometimes awkward quiet. 

And yet, we must also move toward the person in our home, initiating questions, drawing them out, being a "there you are" person instead of a "here I am" one. We ask questions like, "How does your heart feel about this?" or "What is this sadness teaching you about God?" or "What is being revealed in your anger/fear/pride/hurt?" instead of only "How was your day?" "How is your job?" "How are your kids?" The heart is the wellspring of life and so we must get at the heart if we are to minister life. 

We eat good, nourishing, healthy food at the table almost every night. There is no magic here, no fix to the world's problems, no Pinterest worthy spread. There is only true food that nourishes a body because bodies matter too. Hospitality is not only about caring for the emotional or relational needs, but the physical ones too. We light candles every night (I have some beeswax ones in squatty jelly jars right now, if tapers don't work for families with young kids), we use cloth napkins, we eat on real (but mismatched) plates. We nourish the soul while we're nourishing the body by using real things instead of disposable ones or the finest china. We want to remind ourselves that we are real things in a real world on a real earth and if hospitality doesn't extend both inside our bodies and outside our front door, it's not real hospitality. 

We sometimes say "No." As noted above, this one still feels wildly uncomfortable in my mouth. I have a lifetime of saying "Yes" behind me. Yes to the extra mile. Yes to the extra cloak. Yes to whole spaces of a home. Yes to open doors. And yes to open lives. But sometimes saying "No" is best. I think generally folks are either "Yes" folks or "No" folks, and we each must learn to curve into the unnatural word, turn it over in our mouths, utter it occasionally until we realize the world won't end if we say it aloud, and then practice saying it, sometimes saying it at the wrong time or in the wrong way, but practicing it nonetheless. I am learning to say "No" now more than ever before and this too is an act of hospitality, I am learning. It is saying that I am not the Great Physician and I cannot solve the world's problems, I cannot even solve my own, and so sometimes I must say it right out loud: no. 

If you come to the Wilbert home for dinner or coffee or breakfast or Christmas or Easter or homegroup or a weekend or a year, you will feel each of these things in some way in the way we practice hospitality today. Because it is something we value, it is something we hold dearly and inspect often, looking for holes or ways to make better or ways we have failed to make good. We value hospitality, but we are far from perfect at it. Christ is the perfect expression of hospitality, the one who entered in and allowed himself to be approached, the one who brought the best wine and ultimately showed himself to be the best wine. We look to him not as our model of hospitality, though, but as the only one who "makes all the sad things come untrue." 

Here are some books I've read through the years that have helped shape, right, and challenge my perspective on hospitality: 

The Hidden Art of Homemaking

The Life-Giving Home and The Life-Giving Table

Glory in the Ordinary

The Quotidian Mysteries

Acedia and Me

Keeping House

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These Hibernation Days

I hope your Christmas season has been warm and rich, full of reminders that you're loved and there is so much for you to love. Even in my moments of stark disappointment, when I can easily list out all the ways I've felt overlooked by God or others, I remember, "I have so much and so many to love. Even if [fill in the blank], I have been given much by God to be invested in, to love, to hear, to reconcile, and more."

As we move toward the new year, still plodding through the dark days of winter, I am always reminded of God's good design for winter. The old adage, "Bloom where you're planted," is cute, but nothing blooms all year long. Everything appears to die and some things do die. We know seeds must drop to the ground and die before they can be broken open and begin the process of blooming again. Winter is a fallen seed, before it has sprouted again. It is God's gift to us, to teach us of the value of rest, quiet, hiddenness, and death. 

I began the Seven Ways series a few week ago and want to continue today. I said one of the Ways we practice not a work/life balance, but a work/rest model in order to see God as our Creator, Redeemer, and Joy. 

So much is said about work/life balances, especially in the career world. Stay at home parents or spouses laugh at that though, because work is life and life is work and there is no easy seamless division for what is work and what is just life. In many ways, this is a gift from God though. Life is toil, even the weekends are, and when we make these clear delineation of the two, we can begin to grow frustrated when our "life" time (or me-time) is infringed on by work. So instead, Nate and I try to talk about our weeks, months, and our year in terms of work/rest. 

Work is times of faithfulness, of sometimes going beyond our abilities or preferences to get the job done. To be faithful in small places to provide, prove, refine, care for, and supply. This is most of our week, month, and year. We want to go to bed tired at night, spent from being invested in people, in service, in hospitality, in counsel, in vocation.  

Rest is times of knowing God's faithfulness, of seeing the ways our God is our Creator, Redeemer, and our Joy. It is not about us, although it is a gift from God to us. I've written previously about how we practice Sabbath in our home, but this also applies to things like winter or holidays. These are dim days where we feel our frailty and fragility, and where the light of Christ has come and is coming still. These are the days we intentionally step back from much of the daily grind and, instead, look up. 

I am just as proficient at naval gazing as the best of them. It is so tempting and easy to look down at myself or at the world and try to dissect all the missing parts or broken places. But to rest, for me, means I pick up my eyes, look up to the hills, and know my Helper comes from above. It means intentionally not fixing what Jesus has left unfixed. It means not rushing to be or do or go or see something. It means taking my hands off what I want to control. All of these ought to be regular practices but, for us, it helps to have a regular day where we remember in startling clarity how far we've wandered. Our Father is our all-sufficient hope, Christ is our all-sufficient sacrifice, and the Spirit is our all-sufficient help. We need a period of time to just remember, reflect, and rejoice in these truths. 

We practice our sabbath from sundown Saturday to sundown Sunday. That might not work for you, but find something that does. We take our cue from the natural seasons, too, and rest more in the winter. We hibernate. No human body is capable of doing all we demand of it all year, we must rest. For many, "rest" waits for vacation days. We've spent all of our vacation this year traveling, driving, seeing family, engaging folks we rarely see, and we come home and need a vacation from our vacation. I don't think God designed rest to be like that.

What would rest look like for you if you simply removed your hands from plowing, planting, sowing, harvesting for a bit this winter? What would it look like for you to rest, not so you can prepare to work again soon, but so you can remember you are the seed and not the farmer? 

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Seven Ways: Ruling over Screens Crouching at our Door

Over the next few weeks I'll be doing a series of posts on seven ways we try to rule over the crouching presence of sin in our home. I'll expound on our methods for engaging the gospel in these areas of our lives, the ways we fail, and our hope for the Church more and more. 

None of these things are done perfectly. In none of these areas have we arrived. And in every one of these areas we are prone to wander, to fail, and to forget. One of the best blessings of the gospel, I think, is the fact that it never changes. When I fail, forget, and wander—the cross and the empty tomb never change. The point is not to do these things perfectly, but to actually let the imperfection of my doing them remind me of how much I need Jesus every single day.

. . . 

We choose reading, writing, and talking instead of screen-time in order to engage and flourish as flesh and blood humans.

I would say, of all the pillars we try to build our home upon, this is probably the most difficult and the one that needs constant realignment. Both my husband and I make our living by using screens and we are not immune to the allure of news, social media, and whatever new show Netflix wants us to binge upon (currently season four of Great British Bake Off). One of the reasons in my intro post on this I used the verse from Genesis about sin crouching at our door and the need for us to rule over it, is because I believe Cain tried to convince himself that his offering would be pleasing to God. It seemed like he treated it as a gray area, not a black and white one. That's just conjecture, there's no way I can know for sure, but I've always assumed that was the case. 

Technology can be like this. One side of its coin seems good: connectivity, ease, a medium for enjoyment. But the other side can be not so good: producing laziness or indulgence or jealousy, or a God-complex (the idea of being everywhere for all things). The idea is that it is not necessarily sin, but that it is crouching at my door waiting to become sin. I have to rule over that. 

Nate and I are constantly reevaluating, readjusting, recommitting, re-deleting, and rearranging our priorities around technology. It would be easy to see this as failure, but I actually think, in our current culture, that's a good way to approach this. We are both legalists in our hearts and our nature is to cut a thing off entirely (and in some ways we've done that, i.e. our commitment to not having a television), but we also know it's not sin to watch, for instance, The Great British Bake Off. 

I love how Andy Crouch subtitles his book (my running for best book of 2017), The Tech Wise Family: Everyday steps for putting Technology in its place. The creation mandate is to rule over creation, to take dominion over this garden and we cannot do that if we pretend weeds don't exist. Weeds do exist, and for us, the weeds are not necessarily the screen itself, but the time, content, and emotions the content produces in our hearts. We have to be attentive to being addicted, being anxious, being fearful, fear of missing out, fear of the current political climate, overlooking our community, or overlooking one another. These are the weeds produced in the garden of screen technologies.

So how do we combat these weeds? 

It's not easy. And we fail often. That's not me being modest about our failures. We fail often. We are always circling around this conversation in our home. But: 

We regularly fast from certain things. I use the Freedom App on my phone to block all social media except Instagram all week + Sunday, and on my laptop during work hours. The only day it's not blocked is on Saturdays, which is a work-with-our-hands day anyway.

We have canceled our Netflix subscription no fewer than seven times in two years. Sometimes we just need a break from its temptation.

We do not have a television. (This one seems to get the most response, especially from families who have movie nights or use the television to occupy their kids. I don't have kids so I can't speak to how difficult those seasons are. But I have been a kid and I know from experience that when my parents got rid of our television when we were all little it produced good fruit in me. I know it created more work for my mom, but I'm grateful she was faithful with our young minds—even at the expense of things she probably would have preferred doing.)

We do, however, have a projector and so have occasional movie nights or documentary viewings with friends. We're not against watching content, but we do both find that when we do see a commercial or advertisement, they have a jarring effect on us. As they should. So a projector to watch a movie is a good route for us.

We do not read news on our Sabbath. Our aim is to enjoy creation, each other, and to remind ourselves that God is sovereign over the whole world, our only Creator, our only Redeemer, our only source of true Joy (more on this when I write about our Sabbath).

We do not have our phones at the table at mealtimes. Our aim is to enjoy one another and our food, as the provisions from God they are.

We do not take our phones to bed. 

One of us usually leaves our phone at home during date night and the other uses it minimally (GPS or Yelp).

We have all notifications turned off on our phones. I have always had my phone on silent (except for Nate) and no notifications except text-messages coming through (though still on silent). But this week I finally turned even text-notifications off. There are no red bubbles on my iPhone. I find in myself a sick-slavery to them and that's not what I want to be beholden to. 

These are what the Wilbert family chooses to do. These are not Biblical prescriptives, these are permissives. Doing these things permits us to look up, engage one another, trust God, trust one another, enjoy creation, enjoy our home, enjoy one another, fight the temptation to indulge, fight the temptation to check out.

You have to figure out what things give you permission and space to do those things in your family. Perhaps you have young children and the only way you and your husband are going to enjoy one another is to set the kids in front of PBS for an hour. Perhaps you have a sick family member and turning off text-notifications isn't going to work in this season. Whatever our season of life is, we have to recognize sin is crouching at our doors in the form of screen-technology, how will we rule over it? 

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Seven Ways We Fail and Get Back Up Again

The first time the word sin is mentioned in Scripture is not at the moment when sin entered the world, but the moment before the fracturing of two brothers, Cain and Abel. After Cain brought his offering to the Lord (which, for whatever reason known to them and not clearly to us, displeased the Lord), the Lord said, "Why are you angry, and why has your face fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is contrary to you, but you must rule over it” (Genesis 4).

That phrase, "Its desire is contrary for you," has always stuck to me like an autumn burr on a wool sweater.

There are so many things in our lives pressing us back, crouching at our doors, slinking in unforeseen gaps and spaces, taking up room, both invited and uninvited. Sin is not a passive agent, but if we are passive, it can rule over us. There are so many areas in my life where I am the passive agent regarding sin. I say something smartly but intended to get my point across: sin. I leave something unfinished in hopes someone else will notice and do it: sin. I cite needs and desires as my primary motivator: sin. I avoid dealing with my emotions, letting them build and bubble over: sin. Wherever I look, sin is crouching at my door. 

A pastor at our church once said, "We don't get over our sin by constantly looking at our sin, we get over it by looking at the work of Jesus on the cross." This sounds really good, but if we don't make the cross both deeply personal and deeply practical, it can be difficult to see the ramifications of the work of Jesus in all the small places where sin reigns supreme in our lives. We can apply the gospel to the Big Sins, but overlook its power over the "little foxes that ruin the vineyards" (SoS 2:15).

Nate and I have been talking about some work God did in us as singles and now as a married couple, ways we have recognized the power of sin to creep in and the ways it has ruled us (and still does in so many ways), and exercises we do to press back and bounce our eyes to the cross. These are not grand theological gestures, they are small things designed to teach us restraint, remind us to submit, to fear God, of the bounty of God, and of the joy found completely in him. 

Over the next few weeks I'll be doing a series of posts on seven ways we try to rule over the crouching presence of sin in our home. I'll expound on our methods for engaging the gospel in these areas of our lives, the ways we fail, and our hope for the Church more and more. 

None of these things are done perfectly. In none of these areas have we arrived. And in every one of these areas we are prone to wander, to fail, and to forget. One of the best blessings of the gospel, I think, is the fact that it never changes. When I fail, forget, and wander—the cross and the empty tomb never change. The point is not to do these things perfectly, but to actually let the imperfection of my doing them remind me of how much I need Jesus every single day. We fail often and regularly at all of these, but: 

1. We choose reading, writing, and talking instead of screen-time in order to engage and flourish as flesh and blood humans. 

2. We practice not a work/life balance, but a work/rest model in order to see God as our Creator, Redeemer, and Joy. 

3. We eat whole foods, in-season, and locally if possible, in order to care for our bodies and the earth well. 

4. We practice hospitality not as an event or social engagement, but as a way to sacrifice ourselves, our time, and our energy, for the flourishing of others.

5. We choose the way of peace instead of violence and listening over making ourselves heard, as a way to remind ourselves we are not omnipotent, omnipresent, or omniscient. 

6.  We eat meals together in order to press back against the culture of busy, quick, fast, and convenient. 

7. We endeavor to live using restraint in our finances, not so we can build bigger savings accounts or retirement funds, but so we can serve others more freely today.

I often get questions about the way we practice Sabbath as New Testament Christians or why we choose to have a young man living with us or what made us decide to not have a television, and more, and my hope is that in writing more on these specific intents, I will be able to answer those questions more fully. None of these things are without theological purpose and very real—sometimes painful—sacrifice. That's on purpose. Not because we're masochists, but because we're Christians living in a hostile-to-the-way-of-Jesus-environment. It's never been easier, more convenient to not carry the cross and follow Him. So how, in 2017, in the suburbs, without children, with paying jobs, with every gadget available to us, do we say, "No, sin, you will not rule over us. We're already the children of a King." 

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The series will be tagged: Seven Ways so if you're looking for the whole thing at some point, just click on that tag at the bottom of the page.