Hospitality Series: "Practicing" Hospitality (Start Marriage Right)

If you popped over from Start Marriage Right, welcome!

Our hospitality series continues today with some tips for practicing hospitality from Karen Ehman of Proverbs 31 Ministries. "Practicing" being the keyword.

While we're on the subject of hospitality, I'd like to invite you to SMR's Facebook Party from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Central time tomorrow on our Facebook page. I'll be hosting from 11 a.m. to noon. I picked this time partly because that's a good time to take a lunch hour and partly because that's when SMR has scheduled the most controversial questions. If you'd like to give them some thought ahead of time, here are the questions I'll be moderating:

• How do you know if you've met the right person to marry?
• What is a "spiritual leader?"
• What does being "submissive" in a marriage mean?

Asking the controversial questions probably is a bad hospitality move, but I really am interested to hear your answers!

Meantime, back to hospitality...

Karen Ehman of Proverbs 31 Ministries remembers a kitchen so small, she had to fold down the leaves in the dining table to walk through it.

She remembers the banana cream pie she, as a ninth-grader, had baked for her mom. She also remembers how her mom burst into laughter when she saw it and took a Polaroid. The bananas may have been a bit mushy to start, she said.

She remembers the first-ever dinner she, as a newlywed, had made for company—and not just any company, but her husband’s boss, who also was their pastor, and his wife. It was lemon herbed chicken, and, in retrospect, it was supposed to be covered while in the oven. It came out looking like “dried, burnt rubber with charcoal-crusted squiggles and circles on top,” she said.

Luckily, Ehman said, “The Bible calls us to practice hospitality. We practice things we are not good at.”

For the rest of the story (including my family's recipe for spinach balls!), read Hospitality Series: "Practicing" hospitality (Start Marriage Right). For all posts in the SMR Hospitality Series, click here.


Photo credit: Start Marriage Right.