Changing Lives Through Gospel Hospitality
Excited, Scared, Disconnected, Hopeful, Confused, Alone. These words describe well the mixed bag of emotions that was 22-year-old me in February 2001. I completed my college course-work a semester early, and moved to Augusta, GA to begin my first career as a Minor League Baseball Broadcaster. Although no one else knew it at the time, the excitement of reaching a life-long goal fresh out of college was tempered by a mixture of utter terror and deep loneliness, as I left my family and friends for a state and city in which I had never previously set foot to begin a role I was not confident I could perform with competency, much less success.
My first Sunday in Augusta, I walked into a small Presbyterian church with no prior connection other than an e-mail exchange with the pastor with a funny last name. As I sat down, a couple about the age of my parents, turned around and introduced themselves, sharing with me that they had a son about my age. I didn’t know their son would one day be a fellow-student at the seminary I could never have imagined I would attend, and I certainly didn’t know that he would become a pastoral colleague in the presbytery of the church, where I would fill a role I swore I would never fill: pastor.
As the pastor began his announcements that Sunday, I could tell that not only was he aware I was visiting, but he was about to single me out and publicly welcome me, the new “voice of the Augusta GreenJackets.” When he asked me to give my best “home-run call,” and I responded with a self-deprecating remark, I had no idea that he would follow-up with me by inviting me to many lunches and even dessert in his home. I certainly had no idea that in less than two-year’s time, I would ask him for his daughter’s hand in marriage and that I would call him “father-in-law.”
In the weeks following my first visit to this church I would attend and in which I would cut my ministry teeth as a volunteer in the youth ministry, I was invited to the homes of several of the older members of the congregation, who saw a young man who had to be lonely and certainly had to eat. The hospitality of that couple, that pastor-turned-father-in-law, and those older church members gave me the thing I most desperately needed in that season – a family.
In the midst of the busy summer ahead, there will be many people moving into this area, approximately 65-per-day, according to the Wake County website. Some may be your neighbors, some may be your co-workers, some may visit Calvary. All will be in need. Many of these men and women will be like 22-year-old me, finding their way into a new area for the first time, and in desperate search for connection, in need of the family that the body of Christ provides. How might you be like that couple, that pastor, those older church members in my own story?
In Hebrews 13:1-2, we’re told, “Let brotherly love continue. Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.” I’m certainly not an angel, but I am one who deeply benefited from the hospitality of men and women who looked past their age and past themselves and chose to show me Christ’s love through hospitality. This summer, let me encourage you to prepare for the stranger in your midst, to invite the new neighbor over for a meal, to invite the church guest to join you for lunch, to ask your new co-worker how you might pray for him or her in the midst of their life transition.
As you show and share the love of Christ through Gospel hospitality, you never know how you might be used by God to change the life of the lonely, scared, and disconnected. You never know what they might write about you on their blog 16 years from now.