Store Bought Hospitality

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One day a few years ago, I stood on the porch of a lady who’d just had surgery. I had both arms wrapped under a brown Aldi bag with jars of soup and a loaf of bread inside, and I was feeling rather small. As the lady’s son took the paper bag and I warned him to hold the bottom, otherwise the glass jars would crash through, I inwardly flicked myself for not putting everything in a nice basket with a calico ribbon tied around it. 

The thing was, this woman’s need had arisen abruptly, as needs do, and I didn’t have a lot of time to meet it. In fact, I’d almost backed out altogether. I didn’t know how to cook much from scratch back then. My sourdough starter was sitting unfed in the refrigerator, so there was no chance of a homemade loaf. I’d thrown celery and broth for chicken noodle soup into the Instant Pot, but even that felt cheap and lazy. I knew this woman was a mother and a cook, and I told myself the sad story of her opening the jars, bending over the oven to bake a store bought loaf, eating bland soup, and feeling overall uncared for and unloved. 

But if I’m really honest, I was thinking less about her and more about myself. How would this scrappy meal make me look? What if she thought I was cheap and lazy and too busy to really care? And so my little act of hospitality turned out to not be very hospitable at all, because I took everything about my gift and blew it like dandelion fuzz that came flying right back in the face of me, the giver. 

I was recently reminded there’s a difference between showing hospitality and being hospitable. Hospitality is the movement. Hospitable is the posture of a person’s heart before the movement ever happens. It’s who you are (or aren’t). Martha showed Jesus hospitality by cooking a meal, but in her heart, she wasn’t the least bit hospitable toward Mary, whose need in that moment was to sit with Him. 

And that’s the meat and bones of hospitality, isn’t it? It is the meeting of needs.

“Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality.” ~ Rom. 12:13

But this is the trick we play on ourselves—or maybe the apparition that plays before us on social media—that hospitality is all beauty and aestheticism, lemonade on a checkered tablecloth, sourdough and organic meat. If it isn’t homecooked, handmade, or homegrown on the homestead, it doesn’t really count. At least, that’s what I told myself as I stood on that woman’s front porch holding a bag from the grocery store.

And yet time and again in Scripture, we see hospitality pouring from the hearts and homes of people who had very, very little. The widow’s flour and oil. The boy’s loaves and fish. The woman’s two coins in the temple offering. It wasn’t just what they gave that the Lord praised, but what they kept back for themselves—nothing. 

“We want you to know, brothers, about the grace of God that has been given among the churches of Macedonia, for in a severe test of affliction, their abundance of joy and their extreme poverty have overflowed in a wealth of generosity on their part. For they gave according to their means, as I can testify, and beyond their means, of their own accord…” ~ 1 Cor. 8:1-3

An “abundance of joy” and “extreme poverty” met each other in the hearts of the Macedonian churchgoers and up sprang generosity—what they could afford and even what they couldn’t.

I’ll be the first to agree that it’s good, biblical even, to seek excellence in our hospitality (see Pr. 31:10-31, 2 Cor. 8:7). It is good to clean our homes, spread the tablecloth, light the candles, bake the bread. But when it comes down to it, hospitality is not flaunting my kitchen but serving the people in my kitchen or from my kitchen. A hospitable person gives what they have—may that be fresh bread from the oven, or a take-and-bake from Aldi, or soup from the Instant Pot left on the porch of someone the afternoon when they needed it most.

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