Becoming the Stranger

This is the kind of story you have to start by saying, “Everyone is okay.”

At 2 o’clock this morning I heard my husband on the phone. He sounded groggy and confused. “What?” he said. “She’s at your house?”

I was already awake, nursing our seventh-month-old baby, when Steven ended the call and turned to me. “P is at McKenzie’s house.”

Now it was my turn to be confused. Why was our five-year-old daughter at our neighbor’s house in the middle of the night?

As best we can tell, our daughter was sleepwalking through a bad dream and thought her father and I were gone. She managed to open our heavy kitchen door and head outside. There, the cold night air must have woken her, and so she ran, terrified and confused, down the street to the house of one of our neighbors, a young family with a daughter the same age as P. She rang the doorbell, screaming, until they opened the door and brought her inside.

I’m still reeling from a hundred feelings and questions. Guilt (we should have double-checked the door), confusion (how did we not hear her, when I usually wake up if a child coughs in the night?!), terror (what if a car had hit her? what if she had lost her way?) and agony (what else can a mother feel, when she imagines her little one outside, in the dark, thinking she was abandoned?).

But brooding over all these feelings, gratitude sustains me, warms my trembling hands: when my child was alone in the dark, she went to a house she knew would welcome her. When she rang the bell in the middle of the night, it opened to her.

There’s no more powerful picture of hospitality than a child been brought in from darkness.

Only hours before this happened, my husband and I had attended a “Doctrine and Life Symposium” at a local church. One of the keynote speakers was Dr. Jeffrey Bilbro, a classmate of mine from my doctoral studies at Baylor. Jeff’s talk was wonderful (more on that another time!), and I had been delighted to hear Dr. Trueman uphold hospitality as a crucial response to "the desecration of the human person. Trueman outlined three broad working to undermine the image of God: rejection of limits, rejection of ends (i.e. rejection of the idea that things have a purpose), and rejection of natural obligations.

Living in such a world can feel awfully dark - and bringing children into such a world can feel like preparing them to wander in the night. Turning the tide of the culture at large is a work much too big for anyone save the Holy Spirit, and too often we flounder between rage that the world is so broken, and despair or chronic anxiety as that brokenness touches our own neighborhoods and families.

Building on the work of Robert Jensen, Dr. Trueman argued that if the world has lost its sense of limits, purpose, and obligation, then our best hope comes from building up the Body of Christ as a world in which those realities hold true. We can do this, Trueman continued, through a commitment to creed (i.e. clearly and faithfully teaching our members to handle the word of God rightly) and liturgy (creating forms of worship that our beautiful and purposeful, to shape the imagination and intuitions of Christians). Finally, he concluded, we must engage in embodied acts of Gospel witness, and the example he gave of such embodied action was hospitality.

Given my own experience with and focus on hospitality, I was obviously intrigued and delighted by Trueman’s exhortation. But after our family’s experience last night, I’m feeling the power of his call in a new way.

In the ancient world—including the biblical world—hospitality was always understood as a practice of mutual obligation. A host welcomed a guest with care, even reverence, because he knew that he or his children might one day be strangers in need of welcome. We hear this in the words of Deuteronomy 10:18-19: “[The Lord] executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”

We met the neighbors who rescued our daughter last summer, when my husband was working in the garden and hailed a young family walking down the street. Rather than simply wave and let them pass, Steven called them to join him in the garden, calling me to come outside and meet them. Soon we had one another’s phone numbers and we have seen each other at least once a week—often more—since then. They have invited us over for play dates and Easter crafts; we’re hosting the wife’s baby shower next weekend. The lines between “host” and “guest” have largely given way to simple friendship, and yet it was the fabric of hospitality, woven through mutual care, attention, and exchange, that was our saving grace last night.

I’m glad P ran to this family, but I realized this morning that even if their family had been away from home, there were several other neighbors our daughter knew, other doors that would have opened to her. Neighbors who have opened their doors to us as Christmas carolers, who have sat at our table as guests, who have accepted invitations into the garden and who have blessed us with flowers from their own gardens. Neighbors who have joined us for Thanksgiving, who have helped us catch our wandering dog, who have sat around campfire, who have brought us food, who have come to us for counsel. I have often told my children to run to these neighbors if ever Mama is hurt or Daddy is missing.

Committing to hospitality has not only helped me see how what abundance God has given our household, but has reminded me how much we need other people in this perilous world. And not just people — for this morning, McKenzie told me something else that I can’t fail to mention: our dog had followed our daughter all the way down the street to her house. I don’t think I’ve ever written about hospitality to animals, but surely we see the same truth at work. Our Great Pyrenees Galahad, whom we welcomed as a pup in need of a home, went out last night to search for the one who was lost.

Living in a world of so much danger and darkness, our knee-jerk reaction can be to make our walls stronger, to add another lock to the door. And while I will be double-checking our lock tonight, one day my daughter will be old enough to open any lock I set before her. One day she might leave in the night not because of a bad dream, but because of an argument, an adventure, or a broken heart. And if she does, no wall around our little family will protect her. However, if I have worked alongside the Holy Spirit to build a community of people who will open the door to her, of faithful friends who will hound her steps, then I need not be afraid.

Practicing hospitality is a faithful response to a broken world. It’s not an insurance policy, nor a tit-for-tat system for earning credit that can be cashed in later. Rather, it is the weaving a blanket to cover the weary stranger, a work in which we find ourselves warmed and covered, as well.