Open Heart, Open Home by Karen Mains

Can a simple dinner party for the neighbors change the world? Karen Mains says, "Yes!".

And in Open Heart, Open Home show shows how. In this classic on Christian hospitality, Karen Mains steps far beyond how-to-entertain hints to explore a biblical and spiritual approach to using your home to care for others. This approach to hospitality can literally transform the fabric of your community and your world.

Whether you are a business executive or a homemaker, a professional minister or a layperson, a seasoned entertainer or an entertaining klutz, you will find here the encouragement and skills you need to reach out with the gospel through daily acts of acceptance, belonging and love.

Scriptural Hospitality

by Karen Mains

I always laugh inside I encounter Christians who consider the theology of hospitality to be a “woman’s issue.” Rather, practicing hospitality is the expression of a radical life view that often pierces to the heart of justice issues and demands of its practitioners a stance of either civil disobedience or some kind of cultural radicalism.

This is so important. Let me repeat: Hospitality is the expression of a radical life-view that often pierces to the heart of justice issues and demands of its practitioners a stance either of civil disobedience or of some kind of cultural radicalism.

One pastor once told me he couldn’t think of four sermons that he could preach on hospitality! I was amazed. I could spend a whole year sermonizing about this topic.

Let me illustrate. Scriptural hospitality should be the basis of the church’s position on the knotty immigration issues that now face our nation. Instead, we are caught in debates that have nothing to do with Christian conversations but everything to do with personal opinions. For Christians, the dialogue should begin with, “What does the Scripture have to say about this issue?” This may be due to the fact that our premises are faulty—we assume the Bible has nothing to say about this contemporary issue (according to statistics, some 200 million people are on the move globally!) In fact, the truth is diametrically opposite—Scripture has everything to say about the immigration issue, and the sheer volume of passages alone should inform our thinking about how we treat the immigrants (legal and illegal) among us. Read more at Hungry Souls...

Flight Through Life

by Karen Mains

None of us know about the web of prayer that surrounds our lives. We have no way of measuring how many times prayer has protected us, preserved us or assuaged our distresses. We just complain about what goes wrong, howl over the suffering that, unwanted, comes our way; shake our fist in the face of God and cry, “Unfair! Unfair!” But we do not count the ways we have been kept safe, nor measure the days that have been shot through with happiness.

We have no idea how many times He has given His angels charge over us, lest we strike our foot against a stone.

“How was your flight?”

How is your flight through life, through the moments of the days? Begin to look for the gifts of prayer, see if you can detect that figurative flash of wings, the hidden sound of something beating beneath the surface of things. Concentrate, instead of what has gone wrong, on what has gone right. Read more on KarenMains.com...