The Gamble

“I’ve got a new friend, all right. But what a gamble friendship is!" E.B. White

Anne and Diana. Sam and Frodo. Wilbur and Charlotte.

Most of us have a small handful of friends for whom we’re willing to unquestioningly sacrifice our time and energy. If they call, we answer. We drop what we’re doing. We show up.

But as we move away from that relational bulls-eye, we begin performing a sort of interpersonal calculus. The further afield a relationship lies from the center, there exists a proportional decrease—often subconscious—in our willingness to extend ourselves into that wilderness of social inconvenience.

We might find ourselves asking questions such as, but not limited to:

• Do I need to leave my couch for this person?

• Do I need to leave my home for this person?

• If I need to leave my home for this person, is it after 8:00 pm?

• Will I be required to interact with other humans?

• Will I be required to make small talk?

The unmitigated truth, more often than we’d care to admit, is not that we’re too busy to do whatever cool thing we’ve been invited to do. It’s that, deep down, in our secret heart of hearts, we just really don’t want to.

We love our homes. We love our sweatpants. We love that poetic symmetry between couch, coffee pot, and bed. 

Like curmudgeonly Toad from Arnold Lobel’s beloved children’s stories, we are creatures of comfort and habit.

With age comes, if not wisdom, then certainly perspective. We learn what we like. And then, almost as soon as we learn what we like, in the blink of an eye, our neural plasticity aggressively downshifts. Our synapses don’t fire with quite as much gusto as they used to. 

Our lumbar spine starts aching, our bursitis flares up, and our hearing starts to go. We begin cupping our hand around our ear in conversation at restaurants, and find ourselves yelling, “What? Debbie, what did he say?”

Baked into the whole relationship-building process is a certain resistance, a sort of relational inertia. To borrow a concept from Mr. Newton, humans at rest tend to stay at rest; we resist changes to our state of being. Especially when those changes involve potential for inconvenience, inefficiency, and awkwardness.

And hospitality—our embodied proclamation of the gospel—is lousy with all three.

 Building relationships is an exercise in inefficiency. Despite our earnest efforts, we say the wrong thing. We tear down when we meant to build up. We want to connect, but instead, we make it weird. We long for a mutual meeting of the mind and heart, but too often we come away from our conversations cringing.

Welcoming the stranger calls us from the comfort of our Hobbit holes and rabbit warrens. It calls us from the warmth of our familiar circles into the wild unknown of unproven relationships.

For those of you who are new subscribers, welcome! I’m delighted you’re here. Allow me to bring you up to speed. I am currently writing a year-long series of articles commissioned by The Rabbit Room on themes of hospitality, community, and relationship-building, so most of my writerly energy each month goes into the article.

I always post the link for the article here on my personal Substack, but I enjoy giving a bit of extra commentary to go along with it.

I deeply enjoyed writing this month’s article. There’s something really intoxicating about awkward stories, isn’t there? This one, for me, was a doozy. Enjoy.

The Inconvenient Kingdom: Jesus, Hospitality, and the Mess of Human Relationships