05/04/2026
On Setting the Table
Why time is the essential ingredient to Christian hospitality
Jen Po***ck Michel
May 2026
My friend K. came over the day before Easter to help me cook. Five hours later, we finally sat down to the first of the Final Four NCAA basketball games and the food we’d ordered from a favorite neighborhood burger joint. To say that I needed K.’s help in the kitchen that day is a gross understatement, especially because when we broke for dinner, I still hadn’t finished prepping the entrée.
K. had offered to help me cook for Easter, and in years past, I would have offered up a cheery, “Oh, no worries! I don’t mind cooking!” And truthfully, I didn’t mind cooking for our ragtag band of single dad and daughter, African immigrant, mother with Alzheimer’s, three friends, husband and two teenage boys. I just didn’t exactly know how I’d squeeze in peeling the ten pounds of potatoes, snapping green beans, kneading bread dough, and pounding chicken breasts with the early spring weeding and general house clean-up. So: I said yes—and discovered the shared joy of kitchen work.
It’s been nearly thirty years that Ryan and I have been making a home together, a home we’ve generally sought to share with others. Hospitality, as habit and practice, is foundational to my rule of life. I don’t want to pretend, of course, that the front door is always open and that I am ready—at a moment’s notice—to make you dinner. It is not, and I am not. Or maybe I should say: it is not, and I am not because this would be, in part, grossly dishonoring to my husband who would prefer a home that is more refuge than event venue.
Over our three decades of marriage, we have learned to negotiate our different domestic preferences with the biblical call to show hospitality. “Contribute to the needs of the saints and seek to show hospitality,” Rom 12.13. “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers,” Heb. 13:2. “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling,” 1 Pet. 4:9.
In my second book, Keeping Place, I did a lot of work to frame the Genesis creation narratives as acts of divine housekeeping. At the time, I took great comfort in the idea that all my home-making work, especially in the active years of raising children, had value in God’s eternal economy, given how much my work resembled his. We are called to hospitable because when God created the heavens and earth, he was modeling for us the welcome that we extend to the world.
Yet Ryan and I both frequently miss the call to hospitality that is distinctly Christian. I am tempted to fuss too much over the material details. Ryan is tempted to rue the interruptions of guests. To follow Jesus, we both choose resistance: to the ways of the world and the craven impulses of our own hearts. We have grown to understand that hospitality is always the sacrificial giving of oneself, that Christian hospitality is patterned after the self-giving of God’s own humble love.
If Christian hospitality is an act of self-giving, it is, first of all, the giving of time. Yes, hospitality happens in a place. And yes, intentionality—to create spaces to accommodate human community and conversation—is important. But I would argue that before hospitality is about place, it is most of all about presence. Your space can be perfectly appointed and meticulously organized, but if you, as the host, cannot offer unhurried presence, your guest cannot feel welcomed. Hospitality gives in the same measure it sees. And we can only see when we attend. Attention is capacity that requires slow, deliberate time.
If you will attend to your neighbor, if you will receive them by seeing them and welcoming their story, you will have to slow down. If you want to be committed to hospitality, you will have to brake the furious hard-charging of your life and make room for the unexpected, unproductive, and frequently unremarkable elements of human community. If you want to practice hospitality, you may have to work a little less, shop a little less, binge Netflix a little less. This is the only way you’ll recover the necessary time to swish the toilet, refill the hand soap, and shop for the cheese and crackers. (Maybe on Easter, you go the extra mile and pound the chicken breasts, too.)
In the kingdom of God, every act of self-giving is rewarded. In fact, I cannot think of an occasion when the house was full and I regretted it.
Hospitality takes time—which is, of course, the real problem. Here, John Mark Comer’s Live No Lies has probably been more foundational for me that the more popular Practicing the Way. In that book he says something obvious and profound about the relationship between time and community: “In the digital age, we make [the devil’s] job a breeze. Hurry, pathological busyness, distraction, smartphone addiction, the constant stream of alerts and interruptions—these all cut us off from community and feed our inordinate desire for autonomy” (80). It’s not just that you and I are busy, in other words. It’s that our busyness (often self-imposed, often more perceived than real in a digital environment) is an isolating force in our lives.
Maybe one small step we take toward hospitality (and one giant leap toward human community) is putting some boundaries around our time to create the necessary margin for welcoming others into our space and into our schedule. Don’t expect the first occasion of hospitality to provide the cosmic relief for your loneliness, though. Engage it as a practice, a habit. All the benefit is in the cumulative effects of the effort—even if, like K. told me weeks after our Easter dinner, sometimes you do get a little taste of heaven.
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