There is a way of entertaining that gives your guests a show, or a good time, or a magnificent array of new taste sensations in their mouths, all of it designed to make you look good.

It's a glorified way of showing off. You put on the rips for all your acquaintances and the way the game is played means that at some point they have to invite you back and try to outdo you.

You get two fantastic meals for the price of one.

But there is another way, the way of hospitality in which you give yourself.

In one world, the gifts are given instead of yourself.

In the other world, the world God is fashioning

through us the gifts are tokens or chips that represent something else. And that

something else is the giving of the person. Some give gifts so that they don't have to give themselves, like some kind of extortion payment.

Others give gifts as a representation of themselves.

I said above that we must mortify our internal hospitality

bookkeeper, but there I was speaking of our tracking of all our horizontal

accounts. We were supposed to give without specific regard for what we might be getting from those

we have given to. However, we are supposed to look to God for the return.

He that hath pity upon the poor lendeth unto the Lord, and that which he hath given will he pay him again, Proverbs 1970.

There are many ways in which the Lord will repay us through this. One of them is the growth of true

Christian community. As we extend this kind of love, the kind of love that has our

brothers and sisters in our homes without any sense of reciprocal obligation, the Lord is engaged in weaving a

type fabric, the fabric of genuine fellowship, a genuine community, genuine point point of the end.

Selections from How Hospitality Weaves by Douglas Wilson.

Well, welcome back to this episode of Bright hearth.

As usual, I am joined by the sounds of my children.

Someone's whistling now.

...