That bounded open space thread I

From the beginning of our marriage there’s been a particular grace on our lives in the realm of hospitality and hosting, with an eye toward healing, empowering, and unleashing people, particularly leaders. We’ve attempted to steward this by creating what we’ve come to understand as “bounded open spaces” into which we invite people and where we (and increasingly others) commit to be with them, in the expectation that God will meet us there.

Our part has been to create and help define the space, invite people into it, and enter it expectantly, alert to the script that will emerge but is not ours to write. We do what we can to encourage people to fully embrace His invitation to meet with Him there, believing that our loving Father will write that script and good will come of it. Within such spaces we humans do of course make choices that affect outcomes (including the occasional choice to opt out!), but through the years we have only become more confident in His ability - and perennial readiness - to work with that feet-of-clay factor and bring redemption and transformation as we lean in, however imperfectly.

Contexts for this have varied widely, ranging from church to business to family. Our early Kingdom-community and church-planting experiments were characterized by a substantial amount of bounded open space. Even our Shaklee business provided the framework for much of this kind of engagement, in the business realm. The family front reflected this in both our parenting style and patterns surrounding our dining room table or spare bedroom, then an apartment in our basement built for that purpose.

Eventually the entire Three Hills Inn initiative (incorporating ministry, business, and family spheres) was all about this. Looking back, I see the bounded open space thread woven throughout much of the tapestry of our adult lives.

The close of the Three Hills era was necessary for the opening of a new chapter, where the same grace in our lives - now matured over decades of experimentation and development - could be freshly expressed and directed. That phase was geographically defined.

We labored together in the hills of western Virginia to create and make available an actual physical venue, continually expanding the range of resources or services or experiences we - and a growing team of co-laborers - could provide there. Team and personal retreats, sabbatical immersions, crisis care, periodic life coaching, DDQ intensives, seminars, extended transition stays all became part of the fabric of life at Three Hills. Expanding circles of folks from around the globe made the trip, were physically present for a while “on the hill”, then moved on.

I remember the moment when the Lord fundamentally broke through my resistance to letting go of all this, while reading about the critical shift from bricks-and-mortar bookstores to the Amazon.com model and - strangely enough - the organic, self-defining social organization of ant colonies. We (in particular, I, who tend to latch on to things) needed to let go of what was to make room for what was to come.