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The Inconvenient Kingdom: Jesus, Hospitality, and the Mess of Human Relationships—Kate Gaston


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by Kate Gaston


It was Sunday morning, and I was filling my coffee cup at the church refreshment table before the service began. A woman approached the table to fill her own cup. I knew the woman by sight. We’d never engaged in anything deeper than Sunday small talk before, but I had a rough knowledge of who she was—her job, her husband, her kids, and her general social network within our congregation.


So there we were, just the two of us.


I could have murmured hello and walked away. I could have smiled, nodded, and left well enough alone.


Did I choose either of those perfectly acceptable options? No, I did not.


Chalk it up to an ill-timed surge of extroverted energy. Or perhaps I was feeling a Dickensian overflow of goodwill. For whatever ill-advised reason, I decided that, yes indeed, this moment called for a hug.


I came at her full frontal. No tasteful side hug for me, no ma’am.


As I closed the short distance between us, my arms stretched wide in an aggressively energetic welcome, the woman abruptly folded both her arms in front of her chest.


(Sidenote: For those who haven’t yet learned this important life lesson, arms folded across the chest is one of the many ways humans communicate a clear, direct message. And that message is: Do Not Touch Me.)


But it was too late. By the time my brain registered this message, I was in for a penny, in for a pound. So I wrapped that woman up in a hug—her arms still crossed firmly between our bodies—as if I hugged people against their will all the time. As I released her, neither of us said anything. We didn’t even make eye contact to acknowledge the sheer awkwardness of it all.


I immediately made a beeline for the bathroom where I sat in a stall, twitching and cringing, until I’d recovered myself enough to re-enter the service.


As Christians, we are a people called to love people. But, good heavens, it can be awkward sometimes.


And yes, I’m going to say this out loud: In addition to being awkward, loving people can occasionally be downright inconvenient.


Wherever a new relationship is attempting to bud, you’ll find these two bogeymen—inconvenience and awkwardness—prowling that tenuous borderland between acquaintance and friend.


In the wild, you’re not supposed to look predators in the eye. But I propose we give these two relational beasts a good, long stare. When we do, we will recognize inconvenience and awkwardness for what they are: common pests. Less menace, more nuisance, they are the houseflies of human experiences.


From the moment you came bursting into the world, naked (awkward) and screaming (inconvenienced), these two pests have been with you. You’ll experience other things along the way, of course, but these two will have a recurring role until you shuffle off this mortal coil.


You will be the cause of tremendous amounts of awkwardness both for yourself and others. So will I. And whether you recognize it or not, you will be a source of inconvenience to others. So will I.


Let’s embrace it as part of the experience, shall we?



Humans love almost nothing so much as convenience. This love affair has given rise to such modern wonders as Chef Boyardee, Wonder Bread, and Buc-ee's.


Many of you are out there living your lives, blissfully unaware of the beaver-themed gas station revolutionizing road trips across America. Go ahead and carry on. For the rest of us, whether we’ve purchased matching Buc-ee pajamas for our entire family or prefer to give the cheeky mascot a wide berth, we are forced to admit Buc-ee’s has leveraged all those irresistible, heavy-hitting elements of convenience under one roof.


Convenience, when stripped down to its component parts, is all about minimizing the physical and mental effort required of us. We want what we want when we want it. If we can fill the tank with gas, use the restroom, buy a sandwich, grab a coffee, and purchase a cast iron pan in the shape of a rodent with a minimal amount of time or energy expended, we are pleased.


But loving people is anything but convenient. Instead of time-saving, it will be time-consuming. Rather than easy and effortless, it will often be burdensome and laborious. Whether it’s preparing a meal for someone, throwing sheets on the pull-out sofa for an unexpected guest, driving someone to the airport, or making space in your busy day for a conversation, there will be no minimization of physical and mental effort. Love requires ardor and intentionality.


Inconvenience won’t kill us, but building community is never going to feel like stopping at Buc-ee’s, folks.


Efficiency—the streamlining of time and effort—is a beautiful thing. When a system is efficient, the world simply works better, doesn’t it? And when efficiency is missing, you feel it.


Like when I put my coffee cup down somewhere and can’t remember where—forcing me to trek from bedroom to living room to bathroom to kitchen only to finally find the blasted mug on top of the dryer in the laundry room? That sort of inefficiency drives me bananas.


It’s a well-documented fact that building relationships gets harder the older you get. For one thing, whatever happened to all those glorious Saturday morning brunch dates? Or those long weekends at the lake with friends? Or the endless hours playing Settlers of Catan? Where did all that unclaimed calendar space go?


When did the slow creep toward, “I can’t. I’m busy.” become a full-fledged gallop? And once you’re on that horse, how do you get off the confounded thing?


Remember the good old days when you could befriend another kid simply by throwing sticks at each other? According to this study published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, it takes adults approximately fifty hours just to nudge an acquaintance over into casual friend territory. And what if you want that casual friend to be your close friend? Buckle up, because making that leap requires over two hundred hours of consistent, highly intentional interaction.


Building a new relationship can feel like the emotional equivalent of playing Find The Coffee Mug, but without the promise of eventual payoff. I know, with time, I’ll find my coffee mug somewhere in the house. But when I’m engaging with someone new, I have no idea at the outset if I’ll find common ground or relational chemistry with that person.


That uncertainty often evokes efficiency-centric questions: How long will it take to find commonality? Is it worth the conversational effort? When should I cut my losses and go pour myself another cup of coffee in a different relational mug?


At this very moment and in almost every arena of life, we have optimized for efficiency. If we’re not paying attention, that efficiency mindset can negatively impact the way we engage with other people.


Loving our neighbor is inconvenient, inefficient, and (even without injudicious hugging) it can be awkward. What, then, could possibly entice us to venture into these social borderlands?


For starters, our own hearts need that slow work of hospitality. Paying attention to the needs of others serves as a foil to our compulsion to prioritize ourselves above all else. The movement of our hearts towards others—movement which occurs at a notoriously glacial pace—is a change wrought through long, steady, obedience. We offer hospitality as a way of declaring our lives are subject to God’s exclusive deity; we are not our own.


Secondly—and trigger warning for all you folks traumatized by the WWJD bracelets—we must love others because, well, Jesus did.


Jesus did things differently than most folks did. He was a bit of a rule breaker, honestly.


Take that rule about not talking to women, for example. Especially those kinds of women. A safe distance was recommended. Certainly don’t let them touch you. Don’t let them drip their tears and emotions and snot and repentance all over your bare feet. Don’t let them unbind their hair in your presence, and don’t let them use that unbound hair to smear their perfume—heavy with notes of sin and debasement—across your skin.


The presence of this woman, what with her sobbing and kissing and dousing and wiping, would have hit everyone at that New Testament dinner party like a tidal wave of awkwardness. Feathers were ruffled. Pearls were clutched. Goats were gotten.


Read the room, Jesus.


Oh, he read the room all right. But he refused to read it the way everyone thought he should.


Jesus didn’t seem to mind the awkwardness this woman caused. On the contrary, he rejoiced over her unabashed wholeheartedness.


As for convenience and efficiency, there are a number of instances in the Gospels in which Jesus seems to display a flagrant disregard for both.


On several occasions, he is approached by someone asking some variation on the question, “How do I inherit eternal life?” Instead of sketching out the Romans Road illustration or sharing his Ten Easy Steps to Salvation, Jesus answered with a super cryptic question. Or, instead of instructing everyone to circle up, join hands, and repeat the sinner’s prayer after him, Jesus pivoted into an enigmatic story that literally no one asked to hear. Sometimes he even just straight up refused to answer the question.


What utter inefficiency is this? Why would Jesus, who could have snapped his fingers and had humanity fall on its face in worship, allow people to walk away from him? Why did Jesus, who came to earth to save sinners, submit himself to inefficient and, frankly, inconvenient means of grace?


I can’t pretend to know the answer to this question. But I do know that this grace—offered through the ordinary human means of relationship, storytelling, and questions—awakened people to their need. It galvanized them, causing them to grapple with their moral bankruptcy.


Jesus was playing a long game. And speaking from personal experience, what a long, long time it can take to release our clenched fists and forsake our idols. He was allowing humans the opportunity to come to him—or, in some instances, not come to him—by choice. That’s nuts.


It would be decidedly more efficient to reach into our pockets, fish out tickets to heaven, and hand them to people. How convenient it would be if, after handing over that ticket, we could whip out our pocket notebook, add another tally mark for the kingdom, and congratulate ourselves on a job well done.


But what a small view of God this affords. And what an tumorously outsized view of our own productivity.


I wonder if, somewhere outside the space-time continuum, somewhere on an existential plane we can’t currently fathom, somewhere in which the right hand of the Father exists, Jesus is chuckling under his breath as he intercedes for us.


People are messy. We are complicated. We are needy. We are filled to the brim with our expectations, sloshing over with our presuppositions. We will waste your time. We will make poor decisions. We will slow you down. And sometimes we will hug you when we shouldn’t.


Even so, we’re going to have to trust our Father’s long game, and his ardent pursuit of his people by our inconvenient and awkwardly human means. More often than not, the kingdom will come through our everyday words, and God’s will is done through our ordinary, commonplace acts of love. And we are simply going to have to make peace with this inefficiency.


For your further reading and viewing pleasure:




An Alabama native, Kate Gaston was homeschooled before it was even remotely considered normal. She completed her undergraduate degree at Bryan College and went on to graduate school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. For eight years, Kate worked as a PA in a trauma and burn ICU before ping-ponging across the nation for her husband’s medical training. She and her family are currently putting down roots in Nashville, Tennessee. Today, Kate enjoys homeschooling her daughter and tutoring in her local classical homeschool community. She also finds deep satisfaction in long, meandering conversations at coffee shops, oil painting, writing, and gazing pensively into the middle distance. You can read more of her work at her Substack: That Middle Distance.


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