Hospitality: Learning a lesson from Abraham

SCRIPTURE
Genesis 18
1 The LORD appeared to Abraham near the great trees of Mamre while he was sitting at the entrance to his tent in the heat of the day. 2 Abraham looked up and saw three men standing nearby. When he saw them, he hurried from the entrance of his tent to meet them and bowed low to the ground. 3 He said, "If I have found favor in your eyes, my lord, do not pass your servant by. 4 Let a little water be brought, and then you may all wash your feet and rest under this tree. 5 Let me get you something to eat, so you can be refreshed and then go on your way—now that you have come to your servant." "Very well," they answered, "do as you say."
6 So Abraham hurried into the tent to Sarah. "Quick," he said, "get three seahs [b] of fine flour and knead it and bake some bread."
7 Then he ran to the herd and selected a choice, tender calf and gave it to a servant, who hurried to prepare it. 8 He then brought some curds and milk and the calf that had been prepared, and set these before them. While they ate, he stood near them under a tree.

OBSERVATION
I couldn't just pick one of these verses. This whole scene in interesting to me. Abraham is like 90+ and we pick up the story where The Lord comes to visit Abraham as three strangers. You'll notice all the action words used to describe Abraham's response to his new guests.
Abraham:
looked & saw,
hurried from where he was,
went to meet them,
bowed down in respect,
gets them water, food and makes a way for them to clean themselves.
hurried
prepared
I am struck by the way Abraham showed hospitality to these strangers. He noticed them. He moved toward them. He made room in his life for strangers. He provided for them. He was thoughtful to think of their needs.

APPLICATION
A year ago, I would have not characterized my life (and our family) as having the gift of hospitality. We were inspired and blessed by those who obviously exercised their gift of hospitality, but we never thought we could actually do/be that. It's too difficult. It costs too much. Too much work to prepare to have people in your house. It makes us too anxious. We never felt like we could relax AND have people coming over to our house. Plus, who would want to come hang out with our family? We had young kids. We'd rather go over to someone's house who loved being hospitable. Look what God can do. We now host strangers in our house on a weekly basis. Most of these people were strangers to begin with and now have morphed into close friends. Our family made a conscience decision (not an easy decision) to open our home to our neighbors on Monday nights. We were primarily hoping for people who would not consider themselves Jesus followers of church attenders. Over the last 6 months of doing this, we have gotten a lot more comfortable with the exercise of living a life of hospitality. It's become a beautiful part of our family life. One application I have from this is that I want to communicate in our staff blog about lessons learned from practicing the ministry of hospitality. It's really a lost art that I want us to recover.

PRAYER
Father, without Your hospitality, I would not have been offered the invitation and the gift of being a part of Your family. Thank you for noticing me and including me not only as Your friend, but as Your adopted son.
Because of Jesus, Amen.