Change Your Hosting Goals

When I host someone, or a group of someones, it is not my highest goal for them to have a lovely time. My guests don’t even have to become, or remain my friends. I do care about that, but what I want most is the opportunity to influence their life. Usually that influence comes in a package of lots of listening, encouragement and laughter. Sometimes, it sounds like a whole lot of hard truth. Usually, it looks like a lovely community of nearby and far away people who feel free to be in our home. Sometimes, our home is little more than a steaming heap with an open front door. By keeping my goals for hosting clear in my heart and head, I save myself a lot of discouragement and work!

How do you struggle with hosting?

The Beautiful Moment? One group of people, who struggle to host as often as they want to, is very good at picturing spaces. These people have a mental picture of their hosting space and it looks nothing like their home does on an average day. Their mental picture may be heavily influenced by Pinterest or Martha Stewart. Those are two excellent project generators, but not good barometers for how the everyday host is likely to function.

The problem with striving for the perfect setting into which your guests will enter is that those settings are either temporary and not true to your home or though you have a lovely space, it is extremely difficult to maintain in the presence of other human beings. If you’re setting up your hosting scene from scratch each time you host, you’re likely hiding boxes of clutter in your bathtub, getting down nice china and creating flower arrangements. Your preparation work leaves you stressed out during the gathering and exhausted afterward. If you maintain a perfect home at all times, the work you put into it may make you hesitant to allow people the opportunity to ruin it. Humans are messy creatures! Even when nicely dressed and well intentioned, they spill things on rugs, knock over breakable items and clog your toilet. The reality of hosting may be too hard a truth to accept. Instead you say, “I would host more, but I just don’t seem to get to it.”

Here is my favorite piece of life advice. Lower Your Standards! I personally love the sound of that, but it may hurt your heart to hear it that way. What we need to do is actually Shift Our Standards. If your vision of perfection is focused on the visual, then the people don’t actually matter (as long as they’re well dressed). If your vision of perfection is based on people’s comfort, then they can probably eat off of disposable plates in a comfortable, though not perfectly decorated, room. Ask some hard questions of yourself. Do you want to welcome people or impress people? Do you want people to notice your achievements or feel like they are noticed?

How About Some Reciprocity? Another group of people, who don’t host as much as they’d like to, were hoping for a return invitation. It’s a logical assumption if you write it like a math problem. I invite you over. I make food for all of us. We have a lovely time. Next month, you invite me over. You make food for all of us. We have a lovely time. The problem is that people are inconsistent creatures and often don’t return the invitation.

The problem with waiting for that return call and being discouraged from making invitations by its absence, is that you’re missing out on the gift part of hosting. I totally understand that exchanging gifts is super fun, but friends, a true gift does not assume a return. Think about the New Testament, when the apostle Paul actually lists hospitality as a gift that the Holy Spirit gives to people. If you take a look at any of those scripture stories, when God gives a gift, He means for it to be shared. So enjoy the moment; share your gift of hospitality. It’s not just you! The last time we were invited to someone else’s home for dinner is not readily coming to mind. And I made dinner for two families in the last week.

Where Did the Time Go? You may have grown up in a home full of visitors and always assumed that your adult home would be the same. Now you look around at your empty living room and barren guest bedroom and wonder why it isn’t happening. I have a guess for you. Take a look at what is full. Is your schedule full? Do you run your children from class to extra-curricular class? Is your appointment list full? It may be that you’ve scheduled yourself out of community. Take a personal pulse. Are you feeling separated from your friends or community group? Are you missing meet-up times because of competing appointments? You’ve scheduled yourself out of community.

There are two solutions for this. I recommend some healthy boundaries and strategies. Most parents have lots of choices for how to fill their children’s and their own time. The fact is, we can do almost anything, but we can NOT do everything. Speak and write down your priorities. If you want to be in community, block off times for that. Protect key evenings when you’d like to be with people. Only schedule around them. You may have to wait a few months for a program or sporting season to end, but have your plan ready before the next season of activities begins.

Fine! I realize that not everyone wants to do that. I recommend Planned Spontaneity. Again, you need to make your plan in advance. Take a look at any open spaces. These may be around lunch time or only after dinner when the kids are on their way to bed. Make dates during these times. You can hear and be heard over a cup of tea. You can laugh over stories and say a prayer together during a quiet evening at the end of an exhausting day. Just give a friend a call and invite them less than 24 hours in advance. Make a list of 5 people you will invite. Just go down your list until you get a yes. The people who had to say no will be glad for the invitation and may suggest an alternate time that works.

We all have different reasons for the way our lives work and don’t work. However your life works and whatever your schedule is, I recommend that you insist on community. You were not made to be alone.