The Shunamite Woman: Cultivating a Heart of Hospitalityنموونە

Hospitality: One Missionary’s Journey

My concept of hospitality has certainly metamorphized over the years. Serving and living abroad as a missionary has been the top influencing factor of my change in perspective. I quickly learned to appreciate how cultures express hospitality in uniquely different ways.

During my tenure as a missionary, I’ve stayed in big homes, small homes, apartments, tents and even boats. I’ve had a variety of hospitable experiences. But what really spoke to me was when I made visits to the shanty dwellings of the city slums. As was custom, the people who lived there would always offer me something to drink or eat. It might be coffee, dried manioc (also known as yucca), crackers or even ants. Often, there weren’t enough cups to go around, so we shared. There was always something placed before me, but most of all, there was community, relationship, and human connection among us.

I used to be shy about having people over, embarrassed by my small apartment. But then I saw how friends from other cultures packed 50 people into apartments even smaller than mine! I watched as they pulled out folding chairs and everyone crowded shoulder to shoulder in tiny living rooms, happy and content just to be together.

And that’s how God began to change my idea of hospitality. It made me wonder which parts of my ideas about hospitality were truly biblical and which parts were purely cultural. I’ve learned so much from other cultures and really had to let go of a lot of perfectionism as I’ve learned to practice the spiritual discipline of hospitality.

In doing so, offering hospitality has become less about me and more about others and, most importantly, more about Jesus. Really, what we all want is a place where we are seen, listened to, and loved. And that is the heart of biblical hospitality: welcoming in weary wanderers to pull up a chair and sit at our table as we extend to them the refreshing grace of God. Imagine what might happen to our lives, churches, communities, and world if more of us began to welcome in strangers as friends with a heart to see them become part of the spiritual family of God. Who might God be asking you to welcome in?