Hospitality That Extends Beyond the Hearth

I hope to inject more hope into the internet following my last post.  

Hospitality

noun

"the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, or strangers."

Many customs of our land have changed with these "unprecedented times", and hospitality has been no exception.  If we weren't good at hospitality before this pandemic, then we are absolutely terrible at it now.  This art is difficult to excel when one is prohibited from hosting a gathering of any kind.  A person can mope and groan about the undue authority and oppressive legislation wielded by the government, but the question comes down to ... what are we to do about it?  

Standard hospitality is dead.

Or so it seems.

Hospitality does not need to be as narrowly focused as the above definition leads us to believe.  On the contrary, I believe that when we examine the Scriptures we discover that hospitality extends far beyond hearth and home.  The very act of Jesus' ministry was bringing the hospitality of His love to the lost.  Despite the fact that Christ was homeless. "And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” (Luke 9:58, ESV). The Lord Jesus sought to love the unloved and search out the lost, and he did this without having a roof over his head and a table laden with food.

This should not be seen as a political argument, but rather a practical one.  We should not be so confined by four walls to assume that we can only minister inside our home...  The hospitality of the Lord extends far beyond our hearth and home, and so should ours.