Your Table Was Always On The Rota

You hosted twice, and both times went well, and that is the part of this that still confuses you when you think about it in the car.

People stayed late. Somebody cried in your kitchen about their brother and you made her a second cup and she has never forgotten it. Rae said your front room was the easiest room she had been in for years, and she meant it, and she said it again a month later without being prompted.

Then it was Naomi's turn, and you drove out to the house, and you sat in the car for a moment before you went in because the drive was long enough to need a decision about where to stop.

It was not grand. That is what you have to understand about this, and it is why you have never been able to explain it to anyone. It was not a mansion and Naomi is not showy and nobody said one word about anything. It was just a room where the chairs matched, and the mugs matched, and there was a proper thing for the biscuits rather than the packet, and the whole house smelled like a house where somebody had time.

And you drove home and you did not say anything, and four weeks later when the sheet went round you passed it on without writing.

You have been saying it is easier this way. Your kitchen is small, the parking is awkward, the neighbor above. All true. None of it is why.

The reason is that you looked at your own front room the next morning with somebody else's eyes on, and you decided it would not do, and you have quietly been a guest in the group ever since.

Read the instruction as it was actually given

There is a line in a letter that gets treated like a nice suggestion for people with the right kind of house, and it is not a suggestion and it never mentions a house.

Distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality.Romans 12:13

Given to hospitality. That is a description of a person, not an inventory of a room.

Everything in that instruction sits in the hands. Not in the crockery, not in the square footage, not in whether there is a proper thing for the biscuits. And the letter it comes from was written to believers meeting in rented rooms and back workshops and houses shared four families deep, which is worth knowing, because the first people who obeyed that line did it in conditions that would have made your front room look like Naomi's.

So take this now, early, before we go any further. You are already given to hospitality. That is not a compliment I am paying you; it is what is written over a person who does what you did with a second cup of tea in a small kitchen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put the gift in your hands in the first place.

There was a hall in Los Angeles in 1895 where a man named Bresee refused to let anybody rent a pew, and the reason people still talk about it is not mainly that it was generous. It is that it settled a question about who the room was for before anybody walked in, so that no one had to work it out from where they were sitting.

Your group has never worked out an answer about you. You worked one out on your own, in a car, on a long drive home, and then you acted on it for a year.

Nobody was comparing but you

I want to be careful here, because there are two ways this goes wrong and I refuse to hand you either.

The first is to tell you that Naomi should feel bad about her house. She should not. There is nothing wrong with matching mugs and there is nothing holy about a chipped one. A woman who has been given more and uses it to open her door every six weeks is doing exactly the right thing with it, and any message that makes her flinch has stopped being good news and become a different kind of ranking.

The second is to tell you that your small room is more authentic, more real, closer to the heart of God. That is flattery, and flattery is just comparison with the numbers reversed. You do not need to win the contest. You need to stop entering it.

Here is the actual ground. The written word puts hospitality in the hands and not in the house, and the Spirit who gives that grace has never audited a kitchen. You have the gift. You had it before the drive home and you had it during the year you did not use it, because it was not issued to you on the strength of your address.

And your two evenings did something Naomi's evenings do not do and cannot do, which is that a woman with nothing impressive to walk into found she could cry in your kitchen. That is not the consolation prize for a small house. That is what the whole instruction was aiming at.

And take this before the story below, because it is the part that has been missing for a year. You have the grace already and you have had it the whole time, in the year you used it and the year you did not. The written word puts hospitality in the hands and never in the house, and the Holy Spirit issued it to you at the address you actually live at.