By Melissa DeGroot
Adam and I are hosting our second exchange student this year, something we decided to do partly at Knox’s request after our first experience hosting five years ago.
Whenever the subject comes up, people sometimes say, “Oh gosh, that’s such a big job. That’s a big responsibility.”
And yes. It is.
But so are a lot of things that involve caring for other human beings.
I’ve been thinking lately about why we said yes in the first place. There wasn’t one main reason. Instead, I think several little things came together that made opening our home to another teenager an open and willing endeavor, knowing full well the ups and downs that can come along the way.
For one thing, it was familiar to me. My family hosted an exchange student when I was in high school, and I grew up in a larger family. There were already plenty of people, personalities, schedules, needs, noise, and activity in our house.
So perhaps there’s still a little bit of that mentality in me:
What’s one more?
There’s also something wonderful about welcoming someone from another country into your home. We may not be able to travel across the world and immerse ourselves in another culture, but suddenly another culture can walk right through our front door.
You learn about someone else’s food, language, family, customs, assumptions, humor, and way of seeing the world. And they learn about yours. It’s a remarkably immersive experience without ever leaving home.
But there was another reason that mattered deeply to us.
Knox is an only child.
Hosting an exchange student gives him, at least temporarily, the experience of having another teenager in the house. Someone his age is suddenly sitting at the dinner table, riding in the car, sharing the bathroom, navigating family schedules, joking around, getting annoyed, helping out, and generally participating in all the ordinary chaos of family life.
In a small way, he gets to experience something resembling a sibling relationship. And, of course, that means it isn’t always sunshine and roses.
There are communication bumps. There are cultural differences. There are parenting moments and misunderstandings. There are house rules and expectations that have to be explained. Sometimes a lot. Adding another person to a family changes the dynamics of the family.
The initial hospitality morphs over the weeks and months into real life, working to understand and care for each other through our worldviews. And perhaps that’s one of the things I appreciate most about the experience.
As Christians, Adam and I are also very aware that when we invite someone into our home while raising our own son in the faith, we are inviting them into our actual life and not some polished version of it.
We aren’t hosting an exchange student in order to convert them. There are appropriate rules and boundaries surrounding these programs, and we respect those. But we have also been intentional and honest about who we are as a family in the application and interview process–while the students also share in their applications how open they are to participate in a host family’s religious practices.
Our Christian faith isn’t something we can simply remove from our household for a year. Church, prayer, conversations about faith, and life together as Christians are part of the rhythm of our home.
Both of our exchange students have happily attended church with us, and when questions or conversations about faith naturally arise, we talk about them.
What an interesting privilege that has been.
By God’s grace, another young person from another part of the world gets a little glimpse of the faith and hope we cling to every day.
But it gets real, y’all.
Christian hospitality doesn’t always look like sitting around the dinner table having profound conversations about Jesus.
Sometimes it sounds like:
“Whose turn is it to empty the dishwasher?”
“Where are you going?”
“What time will you be home?”
“Did you do your homework?”
In other words, it looks a whole lot like family.
And maybe that is precisely the point.
God so often does His greatest work through these ordinary vocations-the mundane, repetitive acts of feeding people, driving them to practice and appointments, washing dishes, setting boundaries, forgiving misunderstandings (especially my own!), sharing meals, going to church, laughing together, and learning how to live with people who aren’t exactly like us–biological or otherwise!
Hospitality isn’t merely entertaining someone in your home.
It is making room.
Room at the table. Room in the schedule. Room in the refrigerator. Room in the car. Room in your patience. And sometimes, by God’s grace, room in your heart for someone you might never otherwise have known.
Yes, hosting an exchange student is a big responsibility.
But so is loving any new neighbor.
It teaches us to love someone new as Christ has loved us.
And after doing this twice now, I think we’re discovering that making room for one more is a gift each time.
So far, it has been a great experience, since other doors like foster care and adoption have closed to us. That’s a post for another time.
In the meantime, this teenage addition to our family has been a blessed exchange.
