Havens of Grace: Hospitality in a Busy World
This is an excerpt from the founder of Art House America, Andi Ashworth’s “Havens of Grace: Hospitality in a Busy World.” Read the whole piece HERE.
It’s my privilege to speak to you this morning about hospitality, a very large and wide-ranging topic that I’ve been learning about since my husband, Charlie, and I became followers of Jesus in 1982. We lived in Sacramento at the time, and one of the first beautiful things I encountered in our new life was the hospitality of the people in our first church. It wasn’t like anything I’d known before. Nothing fancy or formal—it was just a natural, open-hearted, sharing way of life where people took care of each other and welcomed strangers like us.
We were very wounded birds when we came into the church, and the love they showed our family as they invited us into their homes and shared their lives was like medicine. It was a new kind of community and it was life-giving.