Practicing Hospitality: Creating Margin

Consider what Rosaria Butterfield says is one of the imperatives to the type of radical, countercultural hospitality that Jesus has called us to as His disciples. She writes in her book The Gospel Comes with a House Key, “Practicing radically ordinary hospitality necessitates building margin time into the day, time where regular routines can be disrupted but not destroyed. This margin stays open for the Lord to fill—to take an older neighbor to the doctor, to babysit on the fly, to make room for a family displaced by a flood or a worldwide refugee crisis. Living out radically ordinary hospitality leaves us with plenty to share, because we intentionally live below our means.”

Think of margin as the time in your daily or weekly schedule that is not spoken for.

Let’s be honest though. Most of us don’t have that much margin built into our schedules because we live in a culture that catechizes us into the religion of busy and busyness. To be productive is to be busy. To be useful is to be busy. To be successful and admired is to be busy. It’s gotten to where it has even become standard in our greetings to each other.

“Hey how was you’re week?”

What do we typically say?

“Busy. It was good but it was busy.”

We are a busy people in a busy culture, but a life that is constantly busy has no room for margin. And we need margin. Having margin in our lives is incredibly important as followers of Jesus because, as Dr. Butterfield pointed out, it is having margin that gives us the ability to be interruptible for God’s purposes.

Are the Edges Left Un-Harvested?

When we were studying the Book of Ruth together, one of the episodes in that book was where Ruth went out to harvest grain on the edges of the field. She was able to gather food like this because of a law that God had instituted for Israel in Leviticus 19.

In Leviticus 19, God gives the command that to love your neighbor as yourself. However, before He gives that command, He gives a bunch of specific examples for how we are to love our neighbor. So in Leviticus 19:9-10, God addresses farmers: When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. 10 And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the Lord your God.

God says to the farmers two things about loving their neighbors:

1. Don’t harvest the edges of the field.

2. Whatever you drop in the field while your harvesting, you can’t pick it up.

So if someone was a citrus farmer and they had a grove of orange trees, they could pick from all the trees except from the ones on the edge and if they dropped an orange they couldn’t pick it back up. Now why did God give this law? Because when the poor came along, who didn’t own any land, they would have a place to pick the oranges on the edges of the grove and the ground.

That is putting margin into your life.

A good business man would make sure every last orange is picked and sold to maximize profits. However, that is not how things are run in God’s Kingdom. In God’s Kingdom, we are commanded to have enough margin in our lives so that when a poor or needy person comes by, we have enough to give them.

What this means as followers of Jesus is that we must think about our schedules and how we spend our time, asking if we have left the edges un-harvested and if we have left enough on the ground.

Hospitality: A Matter of Scheduling Margin

For many of us, the problem is most likely not a problem of desiring to be hospitable; the problem is that we simply have no room in our schedules to respond to the opportunities that God puts in our lives. So pay careful attention to this next sentence. We will never live the kind of life that Jesus intends for us to live until we intend to live that kind of life.

Never. It just won’t happen in the pressure and busyness of our culture.

It may sound counter-intuitive, especially in our fast-paced culture, but in the same way we schedule appointments into our calendars, it stands to reason that we might need to intentionally schedule margin into our lives so we’re not too busy to respond to the opportunities that God puts in our lives.