You're listening to the Allender Center podcast with Dr. Dan Allender.

This week as we continue our series about engaging the holiday season in all its complexity.

Dan and his wife Becky talk about their experiences of welcoming guests into their home.

What does it look like to receive others in hospitality and kindness

in a manner that is life-giving for everyone involved?

As we consider the holidays and welcoming guests into our home,

and the guests could be an adult child coming back from college, a married couple with children

coming to be with you at Christmas. It's a complicated, wonderful, glorious, and foremost, ambivalently

exhausting season. What we're hoping to do is just to talk a little bit about the nature of

hospitality and how to make this holiday as good as it can possibly be. We're arguing to some

degree that Christmas is a set up for a lot of conflict that can't be addressed because you don't

want to ruin the holiday for yourself or for your children. A lot of conflict that can't be addressed because you don't want to ruin the holiday

for yourself or for your children. A lot of expectations and pressure and exhaustion

that often get woven into interactions where a lot happens that shouldn't happen and now what do we do. How can we make this

as good a season as we possibly can? So when you think, Becky, about hospitality, and I will say

that people who come into your home, and it's my home too, our home.

But if you allow this phrase, when people come into your home,

one of the things that they say is it's one of the most hospitable, warm, welcoming,

peaceful environments that they have been in.

And of course, both of us are woven into the fabric of this home, but let's just say again, you have brought your very being heart and mind. The light of your life is reflected in virtually

every square inch of this home. So when I think about hospitality, I think about the fact that you are the

presence truly of the open-armed welcome to our home. Thank you, honey. Well, many have said that I have the

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