Hey Beloved,
Two years ago I went full time into this.
The pursuit of redemptive hospitality. The conviction that the art of welcome is one of the most powerful forces available to us. In business. In community. In the everyday places we live and move and belong.
It has looked like workshops and consulting. Retreats and hosting. Conversations with leaders who want their organizations to feel more human. And yes. Still the slow, stubborn pursuit of a riverside lodge on the McKenzie.
It has been one of the most clarifying and disorienting seasons of my life.
And lately I have been in one of those stretches where I have had to keep reminding myself:
The pursuit still matters.
Even when the vision feels heavier than it once did.
Even when the doors do not open as quickly as I hoped.
Even when the fruit is slower than the effort.
But something else has been surfacing too.
Somewhere in the middle of all of it, I realized I had stopped practicing what I was preaching.
Not professionally. Personally.
I had been so focused on helping others create hospitable experiences that I quietly stopped creating them for the people closest to me. The small ones. The ones with no agenda and no invoice and no case study attached.
The kind that happen around a table. In a parking lot. On a slow evening with no particular reason to gather except that someone needed to feel like they belonged somewhere.
So I leaned back in.
A few weeks ago I helped lead a retreat. Not a corporate workshop. A retreat. Where the whole point was for people to slow down, feel held, and leave different than they arrived.
And I remembered something I had let slip.
Hospitality does something to the host too.
It fills something.
Then, not long after, I showed up to a friend's office parking lot with a pizza oven. No agenda. Just dough and sauce and people who needed a reason to stop and be together for an hour. We made pizzas. We laughed. It was chaotic and it was perfect.
And I drove home reminded of something I never want to forget.
It is not the frameworks. It is not the keynotes.
It is the moment someone walks up to a folding table in a parking lot and feels like they were expected. Like someone thought about them before they arrived.
The mirror.
I share this not to perform vulnerability. I share it because I think a lot of us who care deeply about hospitality as a practice or a calling can quietly drift from it in our own lives.
We talk about it. We teach it. We consult around it.
And then we go home and forget to set an extra plate.
So this is a gentle question I am sitting with. And I am extending it to you.
🧂 This week's practice:
Who in your life has not been welcomed to your table lately? Not a client. Not a prospect. Just someone who needed to feel like they belonged somewhere.
Invite them. Set the plate. Keep it simple.
The intention is the whole thing.
With you in the pursuit,
Nathan 🧂
P.S. When was the last time hospitality did something for you as the host? Not the work of it. The gift of it.
