When did the lovely art of hospitality start to leave us? It dangles by a fraying thread, it seems. Even among Christ-followers, mandated to share both home and food, the hardened shears of too-much-business, and too-little-love have almost snipped it from among us.

The Preacher and I recently accepted an invitation to share a meal at the home of country friends. As our car charged like an eager steed over arrow-straight prairie roads, we became escapees to gentler times. Busy town life faded behind us like yesterday’s dreams.

In its place stood a wide, welcoming porch, and an apron-clad hostess beckoning, “Come in! Come in!” Inside, the air was redolent with fragrance. Cinnamon buns. Ham. And something else, discernible only with the spirit: the presence of Christ.

I’m positive he joined us as we sat around that table, beautifully decorated with smiling faces. I know he blessed us with his presence, influencing our thoughts and directing our conversation. I imagine his eyes gleamed. I imagine he listened to our chatter with interest. I imagine he chuckled.

It happened again a few evenings ago at our own home. Clouds hovered all day, threatening rain. But inside, as I prepared to open Hope House to others, God’s Son brushed my heart with joy.

The Preacher was away, so I’d invited five female friends. They flocked in, bearing dishes. We shared a salad supper, potluck style. We sat long. Talked much, laughed often. And sometime during the evening…perhaps when the youngest among us wandered over to our century-old piano, and teased a simple melody from its badly-tuned ivories…perhaps it was then, I sensed Christ enjoying the evening with us.

I have often, and gladly, shared time in restaurants with friends. But the convenience of not having to prepare both house and food comes at the expense of things precious: the joy of serving others, the intimacy of community life, and that sweet sense of sitting alongside a Divine, unseen guest.

When ordinary people share ordinary food and ordinary drink in an ordinary home, and when all that is mixed with love, something extra-ordinary happens. Something much sweeter than the triple-citrus cheesecake daughter Amanda supplied the other night.

Life, I think, doesn’t get much richer.

For decades, our family and friends sat around an antique nine-foot oak table. We’ve passed it on to our children now, but I cherish the memories made around its polished, time-and-child-worn finish.

We have a different table now; round and black, and already sticky with memories of precious guests who’ve shared it—family, friends, strangers. Gratitude overflows in me for each one.

Hospitality is always work. But when love propels it, it serves us in the end, refreshing drained and soured spirits, and dishing up memories that sustain soul-health for years.

I challenge you: open your door. Make it potluck, if you dare. But don’t forget to invite Christ. He is spirit sustenance itself: Bread of life, Oil of joy. Living water.

Invite someone home.

In our slice of the prairies, we`ve seen the sun so seldom this spring I’ve decided not to waste it. So I’m writing outside this sunny morning, perched on an old willow chair in my favourite part of our backyard.

Birdsong surrounds me, and the wind whispers through this grove of old maples. It toys with the rope swing, sways it east, then west, as though prompted so by an invisible child.

Until just a few days ago, the backyard of Hope House—like many others nearby—didn`t invite hopefulness.

“It`s the wettest year we’ve had in over a hundred years,” I`ve heard, from people who keep track of such things. People whose parents and grandparents likely did the same.

Basements that have never flooded before have decided to try it. Dark patches lay like shadows across the concrete in our own. Backyards feel like wet sponges, and dirt roads and lanes are a sea of mud.

Rain wouldn`t seem half so bad, if it didn`t need clouds to deliver it. Fretting about whether the deluge will hold off long enough to pot or plant, side, paint, or build would be much more fun if we could park our complaining selves in a willow chair in a sweet breeze, surrounded by brightness and birdsong.

But clouds and complaints keep company as surely as sunshine and bright thoughts.

Prairie people aren’t used to long strings of cloudy days. We share our misery like a bad cold. Even the optimistic find it difficult to rise above the clouds. After all, a silver lining requires at least a tiny beam of sun.

Reared on Canada’s wet Western edge, I grew up singing, “Rain, rain, go away, come again some other day. Rain, rain, go away, please let all the children play.” Nevertheless, if we wanted to enjoy the emerald coast, we had no choice but to make peace with the stuff that made it green. That meant slickers, rubbers, and umbrellas. From autumn to spring, we rarely left home without them.

Perhaps that’s our problem, we flatlanders. Most of us aren’t equipped for month-long rains.

But here I sit, surrounded by a green as lovely as any of my youth—because of the rain. The sun seems twice as bright as I remember it, and hope fills my heart for my sodden yard and the fields of our farmer friends.

The two-foot, three-striped black garter snake that almost slithered over my foot a moment ago seems happy too. His narrow pink tongue tasted my welcome, and seemed to find it to his liking. He circled me, returning for more. Snakes don’t hear kind words often, I suspect.

God, who does everything well, and who whispers beauty through every weather—thank you for this reprieve of sunshine. Forgive our complaints, and remind us that you’ve given us the ability to choose which side of the clouds to live on.

But help me find a pair of rubber boots, please. It’s clouding over again.

Before he left home, our son Anthony spent a peck of time at the home of one of his friends. I didn’t know that friend’s family, and I wondered when a bill for his room and board would arrive.

A decade later, I’ve finally met that mother. By a happy lack of planning, she sat beside me in church one day.

She surprised me by asking how Anthony was, and explained how she knew him. We chatted about those days, and she told me this:

When Anthony decided to sell his car, she bought it. She paid a hundred dollars for the old Honda Civic, and both her sons drove it for years. “It was a really good little car,” she said. “I never had to do anything with it.”

But one day her youngest son returned home with news. The Honda had broken down beside the highway. He’d left it there, and hitched a ride home. “We should send out a tow truck,” said his mother.

“It’ll be fine,” he told her. “I’ll go back and get it tomorrow.”

But next morning the RCMP called. They’d traced her through the car’s licence plate, they explained. During the night thugs had vandalized the forsaken vehicle, then set it ablaze. Anthony’s old Civic had rolled its last mile.

The insurance company wrote the car off. “We can’t give you more than $500 for it,” the agent apologized.

She grinned, telling me. “That little car was good while I had it, but it was worth even more ruined!”

I laughed along with her—and laughed even harder when she told me about the day she’d bought the aging hatchback. “It was covered in stickers,” she said. I remembered those. The car’s steel blue body barely showed through. Skulls and crossbones, rock band logos, and bumper stickers—our darlin’ boy had decorated his chariot well. Whenever I protested, a new sticker appeared. I learned to bite my tongue.

My companion said she wasn’t stuck on the stickers either. When Anthony delivered the car, she’d looked it over. “Well,” she’d said, “I guess I could take the stickers off.”

“Oh, don’t do that, Mrs. M.” he’d shot back, alarmed. “I think they’re sort of holding the car together!”

She left them on.

We shared a moment of laughter. Of wondrous gratitude that we’d all survived those raisin’ years. But when I thanked her for the free board and room, she tossed it off. “I always loved it when my boys had their friends over. At least I knew where they were.”

I’d love to report that I was that charitable in those days. Instead, I spent less time trying to know my son’s friends than I did fomenting  about their—and his—choices of clothes, music, and activities.

Stickers all. Everyone uses them, and often we’re positive they hold us together. But unlike me, our Heavenly Father looks past those, to the truly important stuff, and invites us home.

Father, make me more like you.

My dearest book, my favourite gift from my sister Beverly, is bedraggled and weary. God’s lively Word, encased in tattered cardboard, is coming unhinged.  Like me, some days.

In case you’ve ever wondered, the Bible is the backbone behind these weekly columns. God uses it to help keep my Sunny Side Up and retrieve it when I’m hard and stepped on. (The Preacher would like you to know how very often that happens.)

I don’t worship the Bible—but I believe it. God speaks life through it, when we listen. And though my copy is old and tired, the words inside remain vibrant, alive, and powerful.

Among other things, it’s the Bible God uses to teach me when I’m ignorant (regularly), caution me when I’m aiming at danger, comfort me when I’m facing loss, restore my creativity when life sucks it away, and bring hope when I’m feeling hopeless.

But my particular volume of onion-skin pages is almost done in. The ends of the bright ribbons that mark my reading places have mostly frayed to fluff. The protective coating on the hard cover has nearly all peeled off.  I’ve scribbled so many notes in the margins of my favourite passages that I can barely read the text. I’ve underlined some verses so often that I’ve almost worn clear through a few of the pages.

Oh, and the spine is missing. Entirely.

Over the last three years, in the upheaval of suddenly changed family circumstances, that pink copy of the Bible has been my lifebuoy. In the worst of times, and often in the best, it’s the book I reach for first thing in the morning, last thing at night, and sometimes in between.

I’ve mentioned here before, the day I noticed my tiny grandaughter flipping through it reverently as it lay on the coffee table. When she noticed me watching, her beautiful face illuminated with joy, “Nana,” she said, “I WUV your Bible!”

Me too, Butterfly Bean. Me too.

But likely not as much as Natan (Anatoli) Shcharansky loved his portion of God’s Word. Imprisoned in the Soviet Gulag for over a decade—for trying to escape to Israel—Russian authorities stripped the dissident Jew of every possession except his miniature collection of the Psalms. His jailers tried often to get that too, but Shcharansky refused to hand it over. That gained him a penalty of 130 days in brutal solitary confinement.

The Psalms kept him alive, he said later. In his autobiography, Fear No Evil, Shcharansky comments, “I took my Psalm Book, and for days on end… recited all one hundred and fifty of King David’s Psalms, syllable by syllable.”

Thanks to his family’s tireless efforts, Scharansky gained his freedom in 1986. At his release, the guards tried again to take away his book of Psalms. He flung himself face down in the snow and refused to walk to freedom without it. The guards capitulated.

I understand Scharansky. Some things in life are more important than freedom.

We took to the water recently, the Preacher and I. Bodies filled the indoor pool, sporting a colorful array of swimsuits, in varying coverages. We wore boring, conservative styles, befitting our weathered frames.

A few decades ago, we looked different.

I shrieked the first time I saw the Preacher in a bathing suit—a roaring-twenties-style, one piece, purple full-body costume. He bought it himself, “because no one else had one.” Sleeveless, it flowed almost to his knees and floated clear up to his collar bones. It had narrow green and white horizontal stripes, and buttons down the front.

Even in the seventies, that swimsuit was an anomaly.

The Preacher’s physique has changed since then. He once had the profile of a pencil (with long wavy hair), weighed a mere hundred and sixty-five pounds, and enjoyed the reputation around campus as an academic and sports heavyweight.

Wearing that suit made him dangerous. His well-aimed teardrop dives erupted in volleys of splashes that sent clusters of co-ed girls, myself among them, squealing in protest to the pool’s edges.

My own most memorable bathing suit was only that for me: a rather conservative black bikini with tiny bright flowers.

I’d purchased it in spite of my raising, one that installed in me a deep-seated certainty that only the female lower legs, arms, neck, and facial skin could tolerate direct air. I’d never owned a two-piece, let alone a bikini, and I wore it only once, on a swim date with the Preacher. (At least one of us was properly clothed.)

On another visit to the local pool with my grandchildren, a lovely lady wearing a truly teeny, weeny, eensy bikini entered the pool area. Benjamin’s already large eyes widened even more. “Nana,” he exclaimed, in loud amazement. “That lady is wearing her undies!”

I chuckled. “It sure does look that way, doesn’t it?”

He watched her slip into the water, then turned to me, “Nana,” he said again. This time his voice softened into full-blown compassionate wonder. “Did she FORGET to put on her bathing suit?

Does she HAVE a bathing suit? ”

“Do you think she needs one?”

He nodded slowly. “Yaw. She should get one. Mama should give her one, I think.”

Right there, I felt a pang of sadness. Our sexually charged culture will assault that beautiful innocence. Attempt to batter it on the craggy cliffs of peer pressure. The devil will help.

My grandson looked at a beautiful body, and saw need—hers. Many others would have seen need too—their own.

Pornography, flourishing through easy internet access, has become a terminal cancer among us. The Preacher and I have watched it kill marriages and rot friends and colleagues from the inside out.

Christ grieves those tragedies—many involve his own children.

Nevertheless, like the Preacher’s well-aimed teardrop dives, websites like www.pureintimacy.org , www.covenanteyes.com , and www.x3pure.com, splash a volley of refreshing hope in the midst of the maelstrom.

If pornography has seared you, remember: God is far bigger.