I Stopped Having Anyone Over

You miss your own table.

That is the honest version of this and it took a while to arrive at, because for a long time the story you told about it was practical. Everybody is busy. People have young families. It is harder to get a group together than it used to be.

All of which is true, and none of which is why the table is empty.

The table is empty because there is a room off that kitchen with the work stopped in it, and you have not been able to bring yourself to have people walk past it, and so you have stopped issuing the invitations that used to be the easiest thing you did.

And here is the part that is worth saying plainly. What you have lost is not a room. You still have the room. You walk through it.

What you have lost is the thing that happens at a table with seven people around it and food going up and down, and that thing has not happened in your house since last year, and it is the thing you actually miss.

You are a man who never stopped wanting a full table, and one unfinished room has never once been the same as a closed house.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging

There is a line in the first letter of Peter about hospitality, and the second half of it is the half that matters here.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. (1 Peter 4:9, King James Version)

Without grudging.

The instruction assumes there is something to grudge. Nobody has to be told to do a thing gladly unless the thing has a cost attached, and the letter is entirely matter of fact about it: hospitality costs something, use it anyway, and do not resent the cost.

And that is a much more realistic sentence than it is usually treated as. It is not asking for a household that finds it effortless. It is asking for a household that pays and does not begrudge the paying.

You have an instruction here that assumed the cost from the beginning, and hospitality has never once been something the word expected to be easy. First Peter 4:9 says without grudging precisely because there is something to grudge, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps that honest rather than making it sentimental.

And now look at where the grudging has actually gone in your house, because it has not gone where you would expect.

You are not grudging your friends. You would have them all tomorrow. The grudging is directed inward, at a house that is not ready, and it is being paid nightly by a man sitting at an empty table.

You have been grudging yourself and nobody else, and a man refusing his own table has never once been what that verse was written to prevent. The Spirit of God is the one who can see where the resentment is actually aimed, and the written word puts the grudging and the hospitality in the same short sentence.

What nobody has ever noticed

So here is the practical claim, and it is not a comforting sentiment, it is an observation.

Nobody who comes to your house looks at that room.

They look at the table. They look at whoever they are talking to. They look at the food going past. Somebody looks for the bathroom and somebody looks for a socket for a phone and at no point in a four hour evening does anybody study the state of a doorframe.

You are hosting the table and not the architecture, and people have never once come to a house in order to inspect it. First Peter 4:9 asks for hospitality between people and says nothing at all about the building, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present at a table regardless of what is unfinished off it.

And here is the second thing, which is the one that costs.

Every month the room stays like that, the standard for having people over gets slightly higher in your own head. It started as the room needs finishing. By now it has quietly become the house needs to be right.

That standard has never been written down and nobody agreed to it and it keeps rising, and it will go on rising for exactly as long as nobody interrupts it.

You were never told to meet a standard that nobody set, and a rule invented in your own head has never once been binding on anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who takes an unwritten rule off a man, and First Peter 4:9 sets the whole matter between people rather than between a man and his own hallway.

And one more, because this must not become a lecture about being brave. Nobody is asking you to have seven people over this week.

You have something smaller available than an evening with guests in it, and a full table has never once had to arrive all at once. First Peter 4:9 asks for hospitality used rather than hospitality staged, and the Holy Spirit is the one who counts the smallest version of a thing as the real thing.

Set it for four tonight

Here is the assignment and it involves no guests at all.

Set the table for four tonight. Plates, glasses, whatever you would put out. Four places.

Nobody is coming. That is the point. This is not a rehearsal for an event and you are not being tricked into hosting anything.

You have a table and a set of plates and ten minutes tonight, and setting a table has never once obliged anybody to invite anyone to it. First Peter 4:9 speaks about hospitality used between people, and the Holy Spirit is the one in that kitchen while a man lays four places for nobody.

Then leave it set overnight.

Here is why. The table has been reclassified, the same way that room was. It has become a surface that things get put on. Setting it, properly, for more people than live there, puts it back to being a table, and a man who walks into a kitchen in the morning and finds four places laid is looking at a different room than he was yesterday.

And then, if you want, take it down and do nothing about it for a week. Or do not take it down. That part is yours.