How to Clean your House More and Care Less {A Practical Way to Be Missional}

Is your life full? Do you have demands placed on you as a student, wife, mother, or career woman? Do you want to extend Biblical hospitality more often but are afraid that your home isn’t good enough? Or worse yet that it’s not clean or organized enough? Well I have the solution to your problem:

Host a standing weekly dinner and invite people over on the same night. Every. Single. Week.

Does that seem counterintuitive to you? Perhaps you think I’m not listening to your current situation listed above? Before you stop reading, bear with me for a moment. If you begin to invite people (both saved and unsaved) into your mess life on a regular basis two things will happen:

1. You’ll begin to develop deep relationships with those who you’re sharing a regular meal with. (And ideally these meals will lead to more time and life shared together as your community grows.)
2. As you become more comfortable with these folks who enter into your home every week you’ll become less concerned about keeping up appearances and more concerned about doing real life together.

Does this mean you can stop cleaning your home entirely? No. In my experience having folks come over regularly, even in the busiest seasons of life caused me at the very least to do a 30-minute power clean-up and at the very most encouraged me to do a thorough cleaning.

What a weekly dinner will do however is increase your comfort level with the people you’re hosting. You’ll be more receptive to drop-ins and last minute dinners. You’ll begin to care more about the state of each person’s heart and soul, and less about the state of your living room. And some nights you’ll choose a clean enough kitchen over cancelling time with your community.

And when you end up ordering pizza or sharing a smorgasbord of leftovers because you burned the meatloaf or the chicken didn’t get done because it was never completely thawed? You may not even care.

(Want some simple and practical tips on cultivating a welcoming home that is tidy-enough? See this post)

About Joy

Joy is a missionary to Downtown Orlando with her husband, Jason, and drool covered Bassett Hound, Sam. She has a degree in Church Leadership and formerly helped manage the Church Planting office of Converge Worldwide. She teaches women how to intersect their faith and life through intentional missional living at joybrudolph.com. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest.

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