Mennonite Meal

31 October 2019

I think I first learned the shape of Midwestern hospitality in college. Every Thursday two professors opened their home to students: forty, fifty, seventy of us gathered around the table and up the staircase in their medieval greenhouse of a home. The food never ran out. 

From dinner to desert a guest speaker told us of neighbors in some lesser-known part of the campus, city or world. Refugees, immigrants, the persecuted and dispossessed—they all had a claim on us as we sought to follow Jesus and rightly use our liberal arts education. 

But at that table, in the warmth of that hospitality, the responsibility we were offered was not so much a burden as an invitation to the ways and rhythms of a Kingdom not our own.