Welcome to my real life: Hospitality in all its delight, and messiness

For the past seven days I have eaten out every meal excluding two dinners and five breakfasts.  I was out of town for the weekend and had a meal-meeting-heavy week, but still. Ridiculous. 

And this is all while I was reading/processing Jen Hatmaker's book about fasting and purging her life of "junk" to better focus it on what matters, including many tangents on eating local, growing your own food, and eating out less. This passage below on beautiful, messy hospitality stood out to me. It's what I crave despite my love of of the ease and deliciousness of eating out at good places:

Practicing the hospitality thing: Homemade roasted veggie salad, chicken salad, cheese and more for a special friend's birthday picnic moved indoors to my house due a park turned unseasonably cold and rainy.

"So yes, eating is still a starting player, but being in each other's homes, cooking and sharing food together is delightful...

There is something so nourishing about sharing your living space with people where they see your junk mail pile and pee wee football schedule on the fridge and pile of shoes by the front door. Opening your home says, "You are welcome into my real life." This square footage is where we laugh and hold family meeting and make homemade corn dogs and work through meltdowns. Here is the railing our kids pulled out of the wall. This is the toilet paper we prefer. These are the pictures we frame, the books we're reading, the projects we're undertaking—the raw material of our family. It's unsanitized and truthful. We invite you into this intimate place saturated with our family character.

Maybe this is why hospitality was big to the early church. Living together in the sacred places of our homes is so unifying... They had dinner around the table. They had Sabbath together. They had soft places to fall when they traveled. Safe in the home of a fellow Christ follower, they could breathe, pray, rest. What a gift..."
-Jen Hatmaker, 7:An Experimental Mutiny against Excess, page 176