I have a few treasures from my grandmother’s kitchen: her metal measuring cups, a buttery yellow mixing bowl, and her famous pound-cake recipe. A few years ago, when I dropped one of the mixing bowls and it shattered splintered sunshine on my apartment floor, I cried. Sweeping it up felt like sweeping shards of her into the trash. But there’s something I treasure even more than her well-worn tools or secret recipes: her legacy of hospitality—passed down like a precious heirloom wrapped in crocheted lace.
 
My grandmother was no Martha Stewart and for this I’m grateful. I tried following Martha’s directions once to make pretty little chocolate bowls for Valentine’s Day. Let’s just say that the directions included dipping balloons in warm chocolate, and that the result looked a lot more like an abstract painting (read: flung chocolate on the walls) than the beautiful edible bowls graced with dainty raspberries on the magazine page I’d torn out.

My grandmother’s hospitality was not Martha’s kind. No ornamental paper lanterns hung from trees, no flouted phyllo-dough hors d’oeuvres, and certainly no edible chocolate bowls. Lois’ hospitality wasn’t the kind meant to impress well-to-do neighbors, or to barb another woman with a twinge of jealousy.

 
No, the hospitality my grandmother practiced for decades with her husband was much more pedestrian. It was the meal that could expand at a minute’s notice when strangers were invited home after church on Sunday. It was the extra place at the table set for the homeless hitchhiker grandfather iwelcomed in. It was taking in a child for several years when not even her own parents could be bothered by the inconvenience of caring for one with a handicap.

As a child, I watched my mom do the same. It shames me that many times in my selfishness I wished the guests gone. Why did we have to share Thanksgiving with the socially awkward divorcee? Why were we inviting that family with the bratty kids after church? Why was the foreigner whose English was impenatrable plopped down in the middle of our otherwise cozy evening meal?

Recently, I was reading Luke chapter 14 and realized what a rich legacy I’ve been given.  “Then Jesus said to his host, ‘When you give a luncheon or dinner, do not invite your friends, your brothers or relatives, or your rich neighbors; if you do, they may invite you back and so you will be repaid. But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed. Although they cannot repay you, you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.’"

This is truly as counter-cultural today as it was then. Practicing true hospitality is a kind of dying to self, and even though I have been given amazing examples of it, I still can’t say it comes easily. I’d much rather invite the person who can repay me. I’d much rather make a pretty centerpiece, than set the table again for the social misfit suffering from depression, the self-absorbed secularist in need of a Savior, or the couple with the Tasmanian-devil child. But I’m grabbing onto my grandmother’s apron strings and not letting go.

Like Brother Lawrence, I’m learning the kitchen’s as good a place for sanctification as any.  “Nor is it needful that we should have great things to do. . .” he wrote. “We can do little things for God; I turn the cake that is frying on the pan for love of him, and that done, if there is nothing else to call me, I prostrate myself in worship before him, who has given me grace to work; afterwards I rise happier than a king. It is enough for me to pick up but a straw from the ground for the love of God."

Anyone can invite over friends who make them feel good, or who can help them climb the social ladder. Only those filled with God’s grace set the table for the hard-to-love for the love of Him. That’s one of grandmother's recipe worth jotting down.