Hospitality is the virtue which allows us to break through the narrowness of our own fears and to open our houses to the stranger, with the intuition that salvation comes to us in the form of a tired traveller.

Henri Nouwen

I had a wonderful conversation over coffee this morning with someone seeking a deeper relationship with God. I went into the meeting curious about his story, hoping to listen, encourage, and perhaps offer something useful along the way. What I didn’t expect was to leave feeling that I had received far more than I had given.

There was something inspiring about listening to another person speak so naturally about looking for God in the ordinary movements of life. His attentiveness to the sacred reminded me of something I can sometimes take for granted: how alive and present God is in my own life. I arrived hoping to accompany someone else, only to find myself newly encouraged in my own journey.

It brought me back to Henri Nouwen’s beautiful understanding of hospitality. We often think of hospitality as something we extend to others: opening our homes, making room at the table, offering a listening ear, or welcoming someone into our community. But Nouwen suggests that hospitality is also an act of vulnerability. It requires us to loosen our grip on what we expect and make room for the possibility that the stranger might bring us something we desperately need.

Perhaps this is one of the great surprises of grace. We think we are the ones offering welcome, but God is quietly working in both directions. The person we thought we were helping may become the person who awakens something in us. The stranger may become a teacher. The guest may become the bearer of a gift.

There is something deeply Christian about this. Jesus so often meets people in the ordinary spaces of human encounter: around tables, along roads, in conversations with strangers. And sometimes, only after the encounter has ended, do we recognize that we have been in the presence of something holy.

I wonder how often we miss these moments because we enter our encounters too preoccupied with what we have to offer, what we need to accomplish, or what we think we already know about another person.

What might change if we approached one another with a little more curiosity and a little less certainty? If we listened not simply to understand another person’s needs, but with the expectation that God might have something to reveal to us through them?

Hospitality, then, becomes more than kindness. It becomes a spiritual practice: the willingness to be surprised, to be changed, and to receive grace in unexpected forms.

Perhaps we don’t always need to go looking for extraordinary experiences of God. Sometimes we simply need to make room for the person sitting across the table.

We may discover that the guest we welcomed was carrying a gift we never knew we needed.