Hospitality Challenge

Saturday afternoon a friend and I headed to my church for a Ladies Tea. We were running early so we’d have a little extra time to grab a coffee and chat. When we arrived I realized I had brought my car keys with me instead of leaving them home with my husband. Since my husband was on nursery duty at the tea, we made a mad dash back to give him the keys. We brought him the keys and headed back.

My friend and I decided to try a shortcut and missed a turn. We ended up going quite a bit out of our way. Due to our mishaps ended up being slightly late to the tea that we were originally 45 minutes early for. Fortunately, my hubby didn’t follow us.

Our guest speaker was Becky Miller. She began her talk with a few stories of her hospitality disasters. After the morning mishaps, it felt a little better to hear that I’m not the only one who has days when things just don’t seem to be going right. At the end she challenged us to extend hospitality to someone else this week.

Sunday afternoon I decided to take her up on it and invited over some friends. It had been a few weeks since we last had someone over and it was a great reminder. Becky made some great suggestions like having the table set when your guests arrive, having the house ready the day before, showing guests where the bathroom is and putting out an extra roll of toilet paper. I managed to forget to apply any of them.

For the most part I would say Sunday was a great night. By no means was it perfect, but we had decent food and good conversation. One of the biggest pearls of wisdom I gained from Becky’s speech was the reminder that things aren’t going to go perfectly, but if we don’t stress over imperfections our night can still be great. That was crucial to the minimal stress I felt while having company. In the past it’s been nearly overwhelming and it was such a blessing to be able to enjoy our company instead of stressing over the imperfections.