Death By Adulting
A podcast focused on helping you make decisions today that you won't regret tomorrow. Hosted by Dr. Steve and Megan Scheibner. The Scheibners share wisdom and advice regarding marriage, parenting, dating, communication and even sex.
Death By Adulting
Stress-Free Hosting: Transforming Your Space and Mindset
Ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of hosting guests? You’re not alone. Inspired by 1 Peter 4:9, we explore the real challenges and profound rewards of hospitality from a Christian viewpoint. Join us at the Death by Adulting table as we unpack the difference between merely entertaining and offering genuine hospitality that fosters deep, personal connections. We discuss the importance of making our homes welcoming and dive into how being hospitable can start with our own families. You'll learn how to transform the exhaustion of hosting into meaningful relationship-building.
From repurposing that old wedding dress for a fun twist to engaging your kids in preparation, we share practical tips to make hospitality stress-free and rewarding. Discover why sticking to tried-and-true recipes can save you from hosting nightmares, as we recount our own mishap with a failed pumpkin pie. Learn the significance of clear communication and the magic of preparation so you can genuinely enjoy your guests. Whether you're a novice or a seasoned host, this episode offers actionable insights to help you open your home and heart, turning hospitality into a blessing for everyone involved.
On this episode of Death by Adulting. Be my guest, but don't stay too late. Try this. It's a new recipe. Why people try out new recipes when company comes to visit Meg's pro tip of the day, plus much, much more Roll the intro. I wish that I knew what I know now when I was younger.
Speaker 2:Do you ever wish you could ask adult you whether the decisions you're making today turned out okay tomorrow? You know, in this crazy world of adulting, sometimes the only thing we know for sure is we don't have to like it, we just have to do it. And if we have to do it anyway, why not do it? Well, that's why we're here. We're Dr Steve and Megan Scheibner. We're your personal on-demand old farts, if you will, and we want to help you make decisions today that you'll be proud of tomorrow.
Speaker 1:All right, dr Old fart here.
Speaker 2:Dr Old fart. Yes, well, here we are, back at the death by adulting table and we're heading into kind of a new topic. We've been talking about communication, but this is just as much communication as anything else we've talked about and it's the topic today and next week too is hospitality, and I think we know, as believers, that we're supposed to be hospitable to other people. Right, you know, the Bible tells us to be that. But I want to share a verse to get us started, and it's this it's first Peter, four, nine. It says this be hospitable to one another. That's good, without complaint, which tells me that God knew, as he was in scripturating the word, that we were going to be grumblers when it came to hospitality, that it wasn't something that was necessarily going to come naturally to us. So why is that? What makes hospitality so difficult?
Speaker 1:Well, I think it's just human nature to want to find something wrong with everything. I mean, there's a lot of people that think that's their God-given gift. But again, sometimes it's exhausting, it's stretching. We're always trying to figure out whether we measure up in a social situation and and then there's different personalities that come to bear on it. And you know, we've had a lot of different friends over the years and I could say all of my friends were all very different. I interacted with them very greatly and some of the friends were more kind of long-term friends, some were kind of short-term friends, but some would get under your skin and some were just absolutely delightful. And I'm sure that I got under people's skin at times too. So I think there's a natural, the cynical side of us. It's easy to kind of complain after any sort of interaction with other people, for sure.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's true, but the other part is I'm tired.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you just get tired.
Speaker 2:Right. You just get tired, and especially as we've gotten older, I think when we were younger perhaps we thought more intentionally about hospitality, but then all of us have kind of gotten into the been there, done that it's somebody else's turn. All of us have kind of gotten into the been there, done that it's somebody else's turn, and so this is just as much for us as it is for anyone younger this need to practice hospitality, and I think part of the reason that we need to do it is that, god knows, we need relationships, and relationships with skin on, to be honest.
Speaker 1:Right, right, yeah, I absolutely agree. Yeah, so we're in a social media world and hospitality isn't over the internet. Right as hospitality and that might be kind of an old-fashioned expression Hospitality has changed a lot and it's not a word that people use a lot, because when I think of hospitality, I think about opening your home and having people in and over for dinner and let's play games or watch a movie or something like that.
Speaker 1:That's hospitality. Hospitality now is more the social media end of things, where you're interacting with people either over a screen or through a text it's not necessarily in person, so there's that type of interaction. Let me ask you this question Does talking to somebody on a screen maybe FaceTiming them or texting with them is that hospitality?
Speaker 2:I don't think it is. I mean, I think you certainly can have friendships that are like that, but hospitality is more of an opening up and inviting in.
Speaker 1:So it's one-on-one and it's personal and it's having what somebody over to your place.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it doesn't have to be one-on-one. I mean, it could be groups. We've offered hospitalities to large groups in our home, but there's a sacrifice involved in hospitality and and I want to make a delineation if I can I think that we would say open our homes, but perhaps we entertain, and entertaining and being hospitable are two different things. You know, um, when we talk about raising children, we say there's no such thing as quantity. Really, quantity, quality time can't be scheduled. Often hospitality isn't scheduled, it's more of an attitude of your heart, which is I can open my door and invite you in, and so there's some things that have to be in place for that to happen. I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons we don't like to do. It is my home's a wreck, life's chaotic, and I don't want to bring you into my mess, but there's still a need to do it.
Speaker 1:Right, I agree with that. I think, as you're describing that, I'm also thinking to myself at the same time. That means you need to keep your house in a position for people to come over. And when I say that like clean enough for people to come over, and when I say that like clean enough for people to walk into and not be like mortified and turn around or feel like they're going to get something when they walk through your door, yeah right which brings up an interesting concept, because perhaps hospitality starts with our own families.
Speaker 2:because if the only time we clean is when people are going to come in and and there's jokes about that, the kids that say, you know, oh, we're cleaning, there must be company coming tonight. Right, you know, the general sense of life ought to be orderliness and cleanliness, but that didn't mean that every room in our home was clean. I think maybe the difference between entertaining and hospitality was, if I was entertaining, I'd make sure every room was pristine and I'd say oh, do you want to see the house? Let me show you this room and this room. And I was looking for someone to say, wow, you keep such a nice house where hospitality is. The kitchen was clean, the living area and a bathroom.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think you know you and I like watching like the Food Network or HGTV or any of those, like the Discovery Channel things, and I think they portray an unrealistic expectation of perfection on those things because they'll, we like the flip your flop shows, right where they get a house and it's, you know it's rat infested, and then you know 30 minutes later it's a beautiful show place it's, but they always stage the home right right, so they bring furniture in that doesn't belong to the person that's moving into the house.
Speaker 1:It's beautiful furniture from the local furniture store to make the place look perfect and pristine. And then they walk you through and they present all the rooms and everybody oohs and aahs as they go through. What you don't see right after that is then they come in and they take all the furniture back out and the people move their beanbag chairs in and that's it. Now. The place is still nice, but it doesn't look the same, and I think you get this impression of hospitality as being I've got to have a house where there's perfect furniture in every room and there's the stuff on the wall. No, you don't. It's just got to be, in my mind, a welcoming place where it's homey and you feel uh, you feel accepted. Uh, when you come to somebody's house, that's kind of a bigger deal for me than exactly how well furnished it is. However, having said that, the cleanliness part of it is you can't avoid that. Either it's got to be clean or at least somewhat picked up.
Speaker 2:Right, I think there's a healthy balance.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:And we had a little card hanging on the refrigerator. If you'll remember, it was pretty stained from food, but it it said am I impressing or blessing? Hospitality is about blessing, entertaining is about impressing and so, um, you know, it's all about my heart, attitude and my mindset and I and I think back how many times I was that grumbler from Peter, and so I did the hospitality technically but I didn't get any blessing for it because in my heart I was like this is so much work and nobody helped me Right. The real joy of hospitality comes when we are focused on just blessing other people, making our home open, and then we will become the place where people want to be.
Speaker 1:Right, I agree and I think for me you know. Back to the cleanliest part I was going to say think about how your mom kept your house when you were growing up and I thought well, hold on to that for a minute, because that might not be such a good connection.
Speaker 1:You might've grown up in a house that was kind of dirty or filthy and not picked up and then, as a consequence, think about this. You probably inadvertently said to your friends hey, I'll come over to your place or let's meet someplace else. You didn't want them to really come to your house, but we can always rise above that. So if you had a great example growing up, then follow that example. That's good. If you didn't have, you can bump up the standard. But you want to make your house a place. I think that is welcoming to other people.
Speaker 2:That's the nature of hospitality, right. And I think there's kind of maybe two danger areas one for young people and one for our age, older, elderly, whatever you want to call us people. But I know a lot of young people that I've talked to that basically have said, well, nobody's invited me over, and they're waiting and they're saying, well, you know, we're new to the area, nobody's invited us. Hey, be the first kid on your block, right? If you wait for other people to invite you, you may never be invited. And and there's no etiquette book or rule book that says they go first, right.
Speaker 2:So I, whenever a young person says that to me, I say you go first. And it doesn't have to be big and impressive. I remember my, my aunt, peg, was married to an air force officer and when you and I got married she said to me it doesn't matter what you have. If you have cardboard and paper plates, you can invite people in, and we really took that to heart. I remember we drove back from our honeymoon and we had the top of our cake, right?
Speaker 1:That you're supposed to save for a year, first year.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and we and we came to our new neighborhood and it was all military families and there was about six kind of duplexy apartments in a row and we waved everybody over and we ate the top of the cake the very first night we were there and that just became kind of our habit very first night we were there and that just became kind of our habit. So for you younger people, you know this may seem really kind of too much thinking, but at one point we moved to Pennsylvania and we didn't know anyone and started attending a church and we filled out our calendar. We're like this weekend we're inviting these people, this weekend we're inviting these people. And we built a huge friend group because we had brought them into our home and in fact when we moved everybody was like what do we do? This is everybody's house and friends bought it so that people could continue coming. So that's young people.
Speaker 2:But how about older people? You know our age and it is easy to check out. But you know we've told audiences everywhere we go. Uh, we encourage people to start these parenting classes with our materials, the nine practices of the proactive parents. But we always say couples our age are the ones who ought to do it. You have the time, you have the space, you know how to make good snacks, open your home, be hospitable and invite people in Right, and that's a way to minister that maybe you wouldn't do, naturally, but you're going to build some great relationships through that hospitality.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely, I was thinking about that the cake top, the top layer of the cake, and I remember driving back with it, thinking I don't know what this is going to taste like a year from now.
Speaker 2:We should probably eat it now.
Speaker 1:It was more of a practical thing on my part than hospitable, but it was fun, it was a blast. Yeah, all of our friends from the military that couldn't be at our wedding, you know, they kind of got in on the fun of it. Yeah, I like that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And this will tell you a little bit about us. But we'll probably do an episode at some point on marriage, weddings and expectations. But there's a lot of things with weddings that we kind of broke the mold. The cake was one, the other was you know, you pack your wedding dress away in a box and you put it in the attic and and I knew none of my girls were going to wear my wedding dress because it was very dated, and so I gave it to him for dress up because you know it's, it's not a monument we actually got a lot of use.
Speaker 1:We did yeah dress of yours.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one of our daughters wore, literally wore it every day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and so there's your. There's your pro tip of the day, right? If you've got a wedding dress that you spend a lot of money on and it's in a box and you're just what worshiping it in the attic, you pull it out, let your daughters wear it around, have fun with it, you know what. At least you'll get some money or use out of that thing, Unless, of course, you really really firmly believe that one of your daughters is going to wear your wedding dress.
Speaker 2:Did you?
Speaker 1:wear your mom's, maybe cut it up and give them a little something old out of it.
Speaker 2:Well, let's talk about kind of the practical side of hospitality. Sure, because it doesn't just happen Right, there's nothing really in our life that just happens. We have to be intentional about it. So, like nothing really in our life that just happens, we have to, we have to be intentional about it. So, like Steve said, you do need a, you need a clean home.
Speaker 2:But I know one of the reasons that some people say they don't want to practice hospitality is because they have small children. And I would say practicing hospitality is one of the best things you can do for your children teaching them to help prepare for others to come, to learn how to ask good questions, to learn how to you know greet someone at the door, offer them a drink. For our kids, we had to teach them not to attack like a herd of puppies, right, because our kids would have been all over the guests. There's some great training opportunities in there and I think in our next episode we're going to talk about hospitality and children. But so that's one.
Speaker 2:Another is and Steve mentioned it in the teaser don't try out a new recipe. You're just going to be stressed and if it doesn't turn out well, it's going to be very disappointing. Um, I remember when you were on deployment and I thought well, I'll invite some neighbors over for dessert. I was actually lonely and so I wanted to invite neighbors over and I made pumpkin pie for the first time in my life, but forgot the sugar. And pumpkin pie without sugar is really bad, really really bad, and one of the guests was very outward with his opinion of it.
Speaker 1:It's a measure of true love. Yeah, if you can eat that, fortunately, I had fudgesicles in the freezer.
Speaker 2:So have a backup plan Right, but make hospitality easy, don't you don't? It shouldn't be stressful. That's part of the complaining comes because we make it stressful. I had I would have young moms over once a week when you were a pastor, because I wanted to get to know them and we had the exact same menu every week and my kids helped with it and I sent them home with a extra freezer meal, you know, and and just find creative ways to do it. The truth is, you'll be blessed. Now I'm an introvert and I don't particularly like people around all the time, but when I practice hospitality because I want to be a blessing to other people, I always end up more blessed than they do right, that's very good.
Speaker 1:Hey, let me, uh, just interject at this point. If you've made it this far in the video, do us a favor and click the like button, and if we've earned it only if we've earned it subscribe so you don't miss any of the content. Click that little bell on the side so you don't miss any of our new episodes when they come out, and if you can share it with your friends, that would help us out a great deal.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so back to the topic. So we in the tease I said try this, it's a new recipe. Why people try out new recipes when company comes over? All right, this has been a conundrum for me for years because, well, you're the main cook, I cooked a little bit, but you mostly, and you had so many great recipes I mean awesome recipes that I I have the tried and true you can't miss. You're going to hit a home run. Every time, and it seemed like virtually every time somebody new is coming over, you'd go oh, let's try out a new recipe, what's up with that?
Speaker 2:I think it's just. I think even when we were young, there were magazines and you look and you go. I got to do a little better than normal and you don't. You don't have to do a little better than people aren't coming to judge your food. They aren't coming to judge your home, your furniture, any of that. They're coming because they want you Wait a minute.
Speaker 1:Hold on, was I right all those years?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you were right.
Speaker 1:Okay, I'll take that. I'll take that as a full-on admission.
Speaker 2:Yes, I was wrong to try the new recipes.
Speaker 1:And I tried to say this as nicely as possible we did have a couple of duds oh, most of the duds were just you and me, yeah, but we had a couple of duds when people came over and I was like why don't you just do the ones that you know? You like, I like it's gonna be a home right, because they don't know.
Speaker 2:I know it just seemed too plain, too plain, my pet, but I did learn from that. Um, I do want to address one thing, cause I cause, honestly, maybe we don't use the word hospitality, but I have seen a lot of videos on Instagram and um my daughters have shared with me of women saying you know, oh honey, company's coming over, can you help help? And then, and the husband says, of course, and then he's out like pruning a tree and and, uh, it's funny in a sarcastic kind of way, but I would say this if you need help, say what you need. And and there's this assumption of, well, my husband ought to know what needs to get done too. No, you're the one that's in the home and you're the one that has the expectation of I want this done and this done. So if you want your husband to vacuum, say you know what company's coming, could you vacuum, right? Right, Just be clear, use your words. That's where communication comes in.
Speaker 2:Um, and, interestingly, twice in the scripture hospitality is addressed to men, uh, with elders and elders and deacons there to be hospitable. But they can't do that in a vacuum. Right, it's a teamwork effort. A husband can't be hospitable if the wife is like on the couch watching TV and says I don't know, order a pizza Right. We have to work in this as a team, so it's not just the man who's not helping. Sometimes it's the woman who's not helping.
Speaker 1:Okay, well, there's no Steve pro tip of the day. There is a Meg pro tip of the day. But if I had a pro tip of the day regarding what you're talking about, this would be my pro tip of the day Say what you mean and mean what you say. Be direct with your communication. Don't nibble around the edges. I think that's what Megan is talking about right now. Let me give you an example.
Speaker 1:Let's say you want a babysitter for Saturday night and you've got a friend that might or might not babysit for you. You could say to them so, uh, doing anything Saturday? To which, if they're not, they're going to say uh, no, I'm free. Oh, do you want to babysit for me? That's, you just set up a train wreck, right? Because now they're, they feel trapped and it's a friction in the relationship because you didn't, they didn't know, they thought you might want to do something with them. All you really wanted was a babysitter. So again, as Megan is describing this, come out with the direct question of what it is you actually want. Most people will feel appreciated for that, instead of the nibbling around the edges with the other ancillary questions like are you busy? Are you doing anything? How do you feel about. You know that's not really what you're after. What you're after is can you do this for me? So be direct with your question. I think you'll get a much better response. That's good communication.
Speaker 2:All right, just a couple more tips to help you with hospitality. And you tease the, the one you know be my guest, but please don't stay too late. Right, it's okay to have an end time and just communicate that to your guests. We have had guests that just stayed and stayed and you have to kind of steward your time well with that. So that's one pro tip. The other is force yourself to do it. You know, practice makes it easier. The more you do it, the better you get at it. The better you get at it, the more you want to do it. Um, so, practice hospitality. And then, finally, don't just invite the same people all the time. Right, stretch yourself, invite people you don't know. You might make new best friends, you never know.
Speaker 1:But if all you do is invite the same people over and over and over, you're not really stretching yourself and part of hospitality is being stretched well back to that communication thing, about that direct communication you could say to people before they come over hey, we got to wrap it up by 10 o'clock tonight yeah and you don't really have to give them a reason for that you know they're just they're going to assume that maybe you got to go to work or you got to get up early or something like that.
Speaker 1:just say, hey, we need to wrap it up by 10 o'clock tonight, and if it goes past 10, because you're having a good time, that's fine. That's the flexibility of it all. But you know how many times over the years that I just disappear, like so where's Steve? I don't know.
Speaker 2:I think he's gone to bed and it is a little hard to explain.
Speaker 1:So again, I think just be clear with the communication and the expectation and everything works out.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so are you ready for my pro tip of the day?
Speaker 1:I'm ready for the main pro tip of the day. Take it away, Meg.
Speaker 2:Okay. The pro tip with hospitality is this Be prepared. The more prepared you are, the more you're going to be able to relax. So don't start dinner when people are getting there. Get things ready ahead of time, then sit back, relax, enjoy the conversation. Don't stress, don't look for compliments, just bless other people and you'll be amazed by how blessed you'll be yourself. So this has been Death by Adulting. Remember, when it comes to adulting, what doesn't kill you. And hospitality won't kill you, just makes you tired.