Amy Boucher Pye

Tag: hospitality

  • Five Minute Friday: Seasons of hospitality

    A table bursting with items for afternoon tea, including jams, cream, cake, and scones.
    My friend whipped up afternoon tea for us this week. She’s a star.

    My heart warmed when I saw that today’s prompt for Five-Minute Friday was “hospitality.” I’ve written a few posts on the topic in the past, which you can find here.

    Being an American in London, I’ve been able to host many a traveler passing through our wonderful capital city. Until some things happened in my family, and we had to pull up the drawbridge for a time. I felt bad when I could tell people were gently inquiring – without asking formally – if they could come and stay, and I didn’t respond with an invitation. And a couple of times I had to flat-out say “no” to the request.

    But that was the right answer for that season, and after the tough thing of saying no, I felt relief. After all, exercising boundaries is healthy and good, even if hard. And when I intimated some of the challenges we faced, the people understood.

    That season reinforced the notion of loving oneself as well as one’s neighbor, in Jesus’ great commandment. We often focus so much on the latter part of that command that we forget we need to extend hospitality to ourselves too. And, if we have them, to our children – a point that Leslie Verner makes in her lovely book Invited. After all, parents are only really hosting their children for a couple of decades before launching them out into the world.

    What’s your approach to hospitality? Have you experienced seasons of openness and seasons of huddling together?

    I am taking part in the #fiveminutefriday community. To write your own and link up with the other writers, you can do so here.

  • Longing for Home

    FMIB Quotes 1 & 2_Proof 2 jpegA recurring theme in Finding Myself in Britain is the longing for home. What is home? How do we find or create it? What do we define as home?

    When Nicholas and I first married, we agreed to call the place where we were living “home.” Not only did this help us in the biblical injunction of “leaving and cleaving,” (leaving one’s family of origin as a new family is created) but it aided us emotionally. If someone asked me, a newcomer to the UK, when I was “going home,” I’d say, “I am home! But I have a trip to the States planned in…” The words we use can help us define our emotions – we sometimes have to educate our feelings.

    Home is a lovely concept – I think of my parents’ home in Minnesota, which although isn’t my home any longer does feel like home, with its lack of clutter and ultra clean space to feel comfortable in while chatting to my family, or the screened-in porch in which to sit and watch the passing deer and wild turkeys (yes in the suburbs of St. Paul!). Or I think of the top floor of a house in Philadelphia where dear friends lived while studying at Westminster Theological Seminary, where I spent many a Thanksgiving. It was only two rooms – and the dishes were washed in the bathtub – but the rafters reverberated with refrains of songs and laughter. Or I remember the historic (for America) house I worked out of for many years and the lovely family who dwelled there, complete with my favorite black lab/golden retriever. On this side of the Atlantic, I picture the homes of dear friends and the meals shared around their tables.

    I could continue in my list, but these places are personal and won’t evoke the feelings of home in you that they do in me. But a common theme of these places where I’ve felt at home lies in the people who make them homey – their welcome, love, grace, and open hearts. They who follow the Master Homemaker bring his kingdom to earth in the homes they create here.

    Where do you find home?

  • Guest Post with Evelyn Bence: Redeeming the Time with Thyme

    My very first guest post! I’m thrilled to host the lovely writer and editor Evelyn Bence today, whom I know through the Christian publishing world. She lives in Virginia, where I used to live, though we didn’t know each other well when I lived there. Yet I can picture her in my former stomping grounds, the suburbs of Washington, DC, which makes me smile. Snarled traffic but warm hearts.

    Photo: Jason Baker, flickr
    Photo: Jason Baker, flickr

     

    Late spring: over coffee I was catching up with a former colleague named David. My news: “I’m just finishing a book manuscript. Fifty-two devotionals or meditations, about table hospitality. The setups are very anecdotal, from early planning and shopping to cooking, conversation, and cleanup. I’ve got forty-two. I’m not sure where I’m going to ‘find’ ten more stories, say nothing of insightful spiritual applications.”

    “Fresh herbs,” he said, taking his conversational turn and describing his nightly foray before dinner, out into the yard to snip parsley, basil, rosemary, thyme for the vegetable or salad served up to his family. “The boys”—high school and college-aged—“roll their eyes at me. But I know they appreciate the taste, and, besides, I’m having fun.”

    When he dropped me, back home, he recognized and pointed to the greenery in my porch boxes. “Remember the herbs. Parsley. Right there. Write about it.”

    I knocked the idea around but couldn’t make it work. The final meditations jelled by other means, other themes.

    cover-Bence_Room-at-TableFast forward to a cold-weather Wednesday, late morning. An editorial job due on my desktop on Monday hadn’t yet arrived, but surely it would come in any moment now . . . or maybe not. Restless and unfocused, I flitted around the house, not able to settle on a new project or pick up an old, until my eyes rested on a bunch of thyme stems, grown out front, pruned way back, dried in a closet, and now pushed aside on a tabletop. David came to mind and his “remember the herbs.”

    “Just sit,” an inner voice said. “Strip the leaves from a few stems.”

    The hands-on—tactile—sensation focused me physically. Then the aroma! My spirit settled down. My restless thoughts turned to prayers, including thanks for David and the memory of our herbal conversation. I stayed with fragrant manual task until I had only two piles: barren stems for discard and tiny pointy leaves for my thyme tin.

    I calmly checked my computer inbox. The job hadn’t arrived. But I felt as if I’d been graced—by choosing to redeem the time with thyme.

    Bence-2014-yes cropEvelyn Bence is author of Room at My Table: Preparing Heart and Home for Christian Hospitality.

  • Welcoming angels unaware

    Will you open your home and heart?

    Hospitality is one of those sometimes messy Christian practices. When we welcome people into our lives, the smells from bodily functions might hang around in the air. Muddy footprints might mar our floors. We might drop our masks, revealing times of irritation or stress.

    Original watercolor by Leo Boucher.
    Original watercolor by Leo Boucher.

    But we’re saying come, we welcome you. We want to provide you a haven of rest; a place to close the room to your door when you need to; a space to converse and share.

    My husband and I are not perfect hosts by any means, but throughout our ten years in our vicarage, we’ve tried to be open and say yes when asked. It’s only in the last year or so that we have not had either a family member or an au pair living with us; that was a particular season of sharing and molding and learning. This summer seems a unique time of welcoming traveling Americans – every weekend, a new set, each with their own gifts and riches.

    A few practical tips:

    • Create a guide to your house. I got this idea from a throwaway line in Packing Light, a wonderful memoir about a woman who travels around the 50 states. In our guide we tell our guests about things like the wonky shower curtain (yes, it will fall on you if you’re not careful) and give them the wifi code. This also can be a repository of tourist information (especially if you live in a world-class city like London).
    • Have in mind a few go-to meals. Our crock pot (slow cooker) has transformed our cooking, helping us to make easy and healthy meals. Cooking a whole chicken, for example, is now painless.
    • Treasure your guest book. Our only requirement when people come to stay with us is that they sign our guest book. We love looking back over the entries, which evoke memories of the gourmet meal cooked for us by one or the Pimms we shared with another.
    • Remember that they’ve come to see you (or your city), and that your house doesn’t have to be perfect. Having been raised in a very tidy home, I find this a struggle. But the visitors this summer will see by our various clutter-spots my “progress” in being able to welcome people even when there is some mess.

    What tips would you add?

    Washing machines at the ready, here we go!