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I’m reading a great book by Lauren Winner called Mudhouse Sabbath – it’s excellent stuff, really makes you think about how you live and why – and the chapter I read today was on the Hebrew practice of hachnassat orchim, or hospitality, and how it should/could fit into the Christian life. Basically the gist of the chapter was this: when you invite someone into your home, you’re not supposed to do it just to provide them with a meal, nor should you worry so much about having everything completely cleaned up. The point of hospitality is not simply to give someone a place to stay or something to eat, but ultimately to invite them into your life. The truth about life is that it’s not clean and tidy; we are, to quote Julia Roberts in Runaway Bride, “completely and irreversibly screwed up,” and we’re to invite strangers, and yes, even our neighbors, to participate in our lives such as they are, and not such as we wish they would be.
I find that difficult. I suppose in some ways this blog is an attempt to push the boundaries a bit on this; by choosing to allow you to read what I have to say, I am inviting you into my life, or worse, into my thoughts about my life – which, by default, invites reaction and commentary. (Feel free.)
Ironically, I read Winner’s chapter shortly after I finished cleaning my apartment so a couple of guests who hadn’t seen it yet could troop through without being subjected to the normal piles of folded laundry three feet from the closet and chord charts spread out all over the floor to the point where you can’t really see it. It made me laugh. Here I was, fresh from an attempt to clean up my act, reading about how really, I ought not to do that, but rather have the courage to allow people into my life as is. I’m not sure I will quit attempting to tidy up my apartment; I actually enjoy it when things are clean and neat. But maybe it’s time to stop trying to present a polished image and just be myself. I think, sometimes without even meaning to, I try to come off like I have it all together… and really, I don’t. Sometimes I wonder if I ever will. Yay for sanctification, and for living in what Amy Grant calls being “caught in between the now and the not yet.” I don’t always really get this mystery called grace, but I’m so thankful for it.
