Hostess.

Yes.

Hostess with the Mostess.

Definitely not.

It was the “dinner party” of supposed disaster.  Somehow we had managed to invite three different families over for dinner who 1. had never met each other 2. come from completely different walks of life and 3. had nothing in common with each other.  Danny was running around town, picking people up. I was scrambling to add extra stuff to the menu because of addition children coming.  The house was a mess. The kids were going stir crazy. and I pulled the food out to thaw WAY later than I should of.

“Danny, we should have planned this better!” I lament over the phone.

So amid the mess, with frantic to-do list running through my mind, and while Atlanta rush hour traffic was endured, we stop and kneel and we pray over the phone (well, I kneel, he keeps driving).

We hand the whole evening, planned or not, over to the Master of the Universe. We invite His Presence in and we ask His Spirit to move and we ask His Kingdom to advance through the oddball arrangement of people that were about to show up at our house. We claim in confidence that He is sovereign over all the details and we would just walk in them.

The prayer did not immediately make my house clean, or the food thaw faster or the kids stop fussing with each other.  But it reframed my mind and put the “work” of the evening into the Lord’s hands and not ours.

Guests arrived, and I diligently worked on a frozen casserole that wouldn’t cook fast enough, plus the gluten free options (which was basically like cooking a whole second meal). So while everyone waited around for the hostess without the mostess, people just started talking and getting to know one another….and I couldn’t believe what was coming out of people’s mouths.  Each thing that was said was what I personally knew someone else in the room needed to hear. With the late dinner, discussions were had that might never have happened, and I had to rejoice in that, despite my burned ego.

Finally dinner was ready, and I continued to silently intercede until mid-dinner, when one of our guests declared.

“I want to give my life to Christ tonight. I’m tired of living this way.  I wanna give my life over to God.”

I choked on dinner…and not because it was half frozen.

God’s Spirit had been invited in.  And more important than our guests knowing each other or being comfortable with each other or dinner being ready on time, was that He was our guest there.

After dinner, we were kneeling in the same living room where this happened.  A living room turned holy ground. It all seemed surreal. Like we were being swept away into the stream of God’s Spirit moving and we just were privileged enough to be part of what was happening.

A former drug dealer and gang leader, forsaking sin and giving his life to Jesus.  A fiancé following suit.  An intention towards marriage.  A dedication of children into a new generational line of blessing instead of curses. A weary manager of the properties in the community getting to put names and faces and stories to the hours and hours spent on rehabbing the houses here. Another Christian from the  community food bank getting to see God show up in this place…. and deciding to join the ministry of Shalom City Church. And a hostess who was beginning to realize she didn’t have to have the “mostess” southern hospitality…just the right guest list.

It was the perfect dinner party, even if the details weren’t.

For when this hostess invites the Most High into the details,

then she truly is

“the hostess with the Mostess”.