Bigger Houses, Smaller Tables, and Taller Fences

How a chance encounter at a small-town café taught me that the best things in life are unscheduled

One of the dearest friendships in my life started because I needed water and had an open morning.

I was on a bike ride from Columbia out to Rocheport on the Katy Trail, one of those long morning rides where you’re alone with your thoughts and the sound of gravel under your tires. I stopped at Meriwether Café to fill up my bottle, and there at a table on the patio was a guy I knew casually, having breakfast with his teenage daughter. We’d crossed paths enough times to wave and say hello, but weren’t yet friends.

He invited me to sit down. I had open time in my schedule and nowhere urgent to be, so I did. And over the next hour we had one of those rambling, unhurried conversations that only happen when nobody is watching the clock. We all talked about life and plans and family and struggles. By the time I got back on my bike, something had shifted. A door had opened between us that neither of us had planned.

That breakfast became the springboard for a friendship that has dramatically shaped both of our lives. We’ve walked through hard and joyful seasons together since. None of that would have happened if I’d filled my water bottle and kept riding. None of it was planned. It started with an open chair, an unhurried morning, and two people willing to be present with each other.

I think about that morning a lot. How many friendships have I missed because I was in too much of a hurry, or because I treated an acquaintance like a stranger, or because I had somewhere more important to be? How many of the best relationships in my life were hanging by a thread that thin, waiting on nothing more than my willingness to sit down?

We’ve become remarkably lonely people. Close friendships in America have declined by half since 1990. Only four percent of Americans hosted or attended a social event on an average weekend in 2023.

Our houses have gotten bigger, our tables have gotten smaller, and our fences have gotten taller. We’ve built home theaters and lost our dining rooms. We open our garage doors with a remote, pull in, and close them behind us, and it’s possible to live for years next to someone whose last name you don’t know. I know, because I’ve lived it.

The loneliness epidemic is not complicated. We’ve spent the last few decades optimizing our lives for productivity and efficiency and career advancement, and we’ve cut the very thing that makes all of it worth doing. We feel the cut. We stopped sitting on our front porches. We stopped having people over. We stopped making time for the gloriously inefficient, survival-irrelevant act of being with other human beings for no reason other than to be with them.

I grew up seeing meals with guests as occasions that required preparation and performance. The house had to be spotless. The hospitality had to be impressive. Everything had to be just right before anyone could come through the door. There was real love in that effort, a genuine desire to honor the people we were hosting.

But, I absorbed something from it that I’ve struggled to unlearn. I absorbed the idea that hospitality is a production, that you can’t have people over until everything is ready, and that being seen in your mess is a failure. Those beliefs, carried far enough, become a fence. It kept me from extending an invitation more times than I want to admit. I was protecting an image instead of building a relationship. I still catch myself doing it. The control impulse runs deep.

Preparation and performance can look similar, but they function completely differently. Thoughtfulness toward your guests is a form of love. The danger comes when that thoughtfulness curdles into perfectionism, when the preparation becomes about you looking good instead of your guest feeling known. The answer is to prepare with open hands, to do the work, and then let go of the outcome. Set a beautiful table and open a great bottle of wine, and also be fine when the wine gets spilled.

One of the ways I’ve learned to practice this is by cooking steak for people. But the steak was never really the point. Cooking for someone is one of the purest forms of hospitality I know. There’s something about standing over a hot grill and doing the careful work on behalf of someone else’s enjoyment that changes the posture of the evening. It’s an act of service disguised as dinner. When people taste something that was made with that kind of attention, they know it. The meal becomes a conversation before anyone says a word.

I’ve cooked steak for friends going through divorces and friends celebrating promotions and friends who just needed a night away from their own kitchens. Some of the most important conversations of my life have happened around a cutting board. There’s something about fire and smoke and shared food that disarms people in ways I don’t fully understand and don’t need to.

The whole Bible is a story told around tables. Abraham and Sarah hosted three strangers under the oaks of Mamre, not knowing they were entertaining angels. The Passover meal became the hinge of Israel’s identity. Jesus spent so much of his ministry eating and drinking with people that his critics made it their primary slander. He ate with tax collectors. He ate with sinners. He ate with prostitutes, the unclean, the unloved, and the unseen. He didn’t wait for them to get their lives together first. He sat down with them as they were, and the meal itself became an invitation.

Jesus could have chosen any setting for his most important work. He chose dinner tables over and over again. The feeding of the five thousand. The Last Supper. The breakfast on the beach after the resurrection. The Gospels move from meal to meal, and the whole story ends at a banquet. The marriage supper of the Lamb. Eternity itself is described as a feast. Every time we open our homes and feed someone, we’re rehearsing for a future God has already promised.

The early church understood this instinctively. Acts describes them breaking bread from house to house, eating together with glad and generous hearts. This wasn’t a religious program. It was how they lived. Their homes became the primary venue for everything the church was doing. The teaching, the worship, the care for widows and orphans, all of it happening around tables in ordinary houses. The church didn’t grow because it had great buildings. It grew because it had open doors.

A few years ago I started an event called Main Street Summit. It grew out of something smaller, an intimate gathering of investors and business owners in Columbia, Missouri, where my firm Permanent Equity is based. The early versions were a couple hundred people, and the magic of those first gatherings was the same magic as a good dinner party. People who didn’t know each other sitting together, eating together, talking about the things they actually cared about instead of performing for each other. A manufacturer from Ohio next to a tech founder from Toronto next to a third-generation family business owner from Alabama, and by the second glass of wine they’d be swapping stories like old friends.

The event has since grown, but it still feels like a dinner party. Hospitality is baked into everything we do. The content is the excuse. The relationships are the thing. I’ve watched friendships form over those tables that have lasted years, that have turned into business partnerships and mentorships, and the kind of deep, honest relationships that most people say they want and very few people build.

The fences we’ve built are everywhere, and most of them are invisible. We’ve designed our neighborhoods to minimize contact with each other and then wondered why nobody knows anybody. We’re awash in gated communities and privacy fences. Some are relational. Busyness is a clear boundary. The curated image of perfection is a wall. We send the subtle signal that we’re too important, too scheduled, and too put-together to be interrupted. We befriend people who believe what we believe, earn what we earn, look like us, and vote like us. We’ve sorted ourselves into tribes and called it community.

Jesus tore down every one of those fences. The religious leaders of his day were obsessed with boundaries, who was clean, who was unclean, who was in, who was out. Jesus walked straight through every line they drew. He touched lepers. He spoke to Samaritans. He let a sinful woman wash his feet with her tears at a Pharisee’s dinner party. He was constantly crossing boundaries that everyone else thought were sacred, and every time he did, he revealed something about the heart of God.

I think about what my kids are learning from all of this. They’re watching whether our family is a fortress or a refuge. Whether outsiders are welcome or suspicious. Whether generosity is something we talk about on Sunday or something we practice on a Tuesday night. Every time we pull up an extra chair, every time we say yes to an unexpected guest, every time we share a meal with someone who doesn’t look like us or think like us, we’re teaching our children something about the character of God that no education can replicate. God is a host. His door is open. His table is long and there is always room.

Friendship requires inefficiency. The best conversations I’ve ever had were unplanned, unstructured, and went on far longer than they should have. They happened on front porches and around fire pits and at kitchen tables where someone stayed for one more glass and the talking got honest. Conversations that meander and circle back and land somewhere nobody expected. These are the spaces where trust gets built and where people become known to each other.

That morning at Meriwether Café was gloriously inefficient. I had a ride to finish. He had stuff to do. Neither of us had penciled in an extra hour. And if we’d been living by our calendars, we would have missed it. The best moments of my life were unscheduled.

I’m writing this as a conviction aimed at myself as much as anyone. I want to build longer tables. I want to tear down the fences I’ve built, the ones made of busyness and image and comfort and the quiet fear that if people really saw my life they’d think less of me. I want my home to be the kind of place where people feel welcomed and known and fed, where the preparation honors the guest and the imperfections don’t matter. I want my business to feel that way. I want my church to feel that way. I want every space I touch to carry the faint echo of that first-century church, breaking bread from house to house, glad and generous, with doors wide open.

Here’s what I’d ask of you. This week, have someone over. Take the time to prepare something with care, even if it’s simple. Let the evening be what it will be. If you don’t know your neighbors, knock on their door and introduce yourself. If you have a friend you haven’t seen in months, call them and ask them to come over tonight. If you see an acquaintance having breakfast at a café on a Saturday morning, and they invite you to sit down, sit down. You have no idea what might come of it.