Today I’m thrilled to share the fifth guest post in my guest blog series on the seven practices I write about in my new book, Putting Joy into Practice: Seven Ways to Lift Your Spirit from the Early Church, published by Paraclete Press and released on April 16, 2019. This time, you don’t have to take it from me – each guest shares his or her own stories about how each practice helps him or her experience joy.

Today’s guest post comes from my dear friend and fellow writer Allison Backous Troy. Allison has shared book reviews and a popular guest post on Being in Community before.  In this guest post, she shares her experiences with the fifth practice, hospitality, and how it can heal us.

By Allison Backous Troy

My friend Ruth and I were neighbors over ten years ago, and we bonded over sharing recipes, watching Downtown Abbey, and eventually eating together on a weekly basis. Ruth was, and is, an organizer – she thrives when she has a list in hand and a date on the calendar. And while I am also a planner, I am a bit more haphazard than Ruth. These seemingly opposite tendencies combined perfectly for our first Thanksgiving together as neighbors, where Ruth and I threw a Thanksgiving party for friends at Ruth’s seminary.

Thirty-five people lined the walls of my two-bedroom apartment, and while we still talk about our salt-roasted turkey, what I remember most is the laughter of many young graduate students sharing a holiday meal, most of them far from home. And what I also remember was Ruth’s quiet practicality, her thinking in advance of what our guests might need (which turned out to be a second dish of stuffing from her oven). When Ruth later pastored a local church with a large refugee community, that same practicality helped many asylum seekers find roots in their new country. I loved seeing Ruth’s gift of resourcefulness welcome the stranger in her midst.

In the hospitality chapter of Putting Joy into Practice, Phoebe makes claims about what it means to welcome, and to receive, in a way that not only resonated with me, but deeply challenged my ideas about hospitality in a Christian context.

For me, hospitality is at the heart of the Christian life. How else can you describe the way God loves us, both at the chalice and in Jesus’s earthly ministry, other than hospitality? Here we have a God who not only prepares a place for us, but offers us himself, wholly and completely, body and blood, rescue and resurrection. Christ’s life is the ultimate invitation to weary, hurting hearts; and as imitators of Christ, it should be our joy to welcome others, to bring hurting people into our homes and lives. It should easy, and it should be the standard.

And yet, it is not. It is easy to scan Pinterest for cute entertaining ideas, to gather the people we already know for easy celebrations. And it’s also easy to retreat within ourselves; it is so easy to forget the generative power of welcoming that heals our own hearts. It is so easy to forget that what Christ offers, and what we are called to share, is connection – not a fancy spread, but an open heart. Phoebe describes this as a spiritual illness, one particularly symptomatic of our time:

Connection is where we learn from each other, where we experience the joy of God’s presence. True, meaningful, authentic connection is something we are starving for…the kind of hospitality that brings joy is the one that goes deeper, opening the door for vulnerability and authenticity (111 – 112).

What I love so dearly about this approach is that it speaks to the spiritual truth of hospitality’s outward focus: we invite, not to wow, but to connect. This has been so true for me in my own spiritual journey. In the times where I have been genuinely welcomed, it has never been about the food or the atmosphere, but about the intentionality behind the hosts. A shared cup of coffee at a kitchen table, with a listening ear, has shown me Christ so clearly, so many times in my life. Phoebe writes that “when we welcome a visitor into our homes, we welcome Christ” (115).

Of course, this is true, and we have heard it before. But have we heard it fully, in a way that prompts us to open our doors? Are we prepared to examine the things that keep us from opening ourselves to those around us, whoever they are? So often, our inability to joyfully practice the virtues of the Christian life comes from deep, unattended woundedness. Whether that is a prejudice infecting our hearts, or a trauma hiding behind our lack of responses to those around us, our hesitancy to welcome others comes from what needs mending inside us.

And this is so key to what Phoebe presents to us – welcoming others, and welcoming Christ in others, is the cure. Because when we welcome Christ through welcoming others, we are not only the host – we are Christ’s guest. We become a recipient of his healing presence. We ourselves are greeted, and loved, in the holy dynamic that takes place in the welcome of others. For “when Christ visits, we encounter him and he changes us.” (115)

How much we need this change – how much we need this healing, and to open this healing for others. How desperately this message is needed for Christians in America, who are surrounded by messages about protecting themselves, building walls, and drawing lines between us and them. Thank God for Phoebe’s words, which remind us that “our homes can be a place of peace and refuge” (122). May we open ourselves to the joy of welcoming others around us, and in so doing, find the refuge that we also need.

Allison Backous Troy is a writer and educator living in Houston, Texas, where her husband is clergy at Annunciation Greek Orthodox Cathedral. She received her MFA from Seattle Pacific University and has been published in Image, the St. Katherine’s Review, Comment Magazine, Art House America, and the Crab Orchard Review. Her long-form essay on hospitality will soon appear on Faith & Leadership Magazine. To read more from Allison, see:

Praying the Jesus Prayer Showed Me Christ in Faith and Leadership.

She Will Not Live A Small Life in Pantheos.

Reading Others, Reading Ourselves in Comment.

A Holy Habitation for Life’s Story in Image.

Read an excerpt from the hospitality chapter of Putting Joy into Practice in Faith & Leadership Magazine here.