Hospitality from the heart

In the last hour of her retreat at the John Paul II Healing Center in Florida, Lisa Harris’ mind was already at the airport.

So when Dr. Bob Schuchts asked the retreatants to end the retreat in adoration, telling God the desires of their hearts, she kept it simple: God, I desire whatever you have in store for me.

“And I felt God say to me, ‘But what do YOU want?’” she said.

To do Your will, she replied again.

But tell me about your dream, God answered.

Back and forth they went in prayer.

“I knew what it was, I just didn’t want to voice it,” Lisa said. But finally, “I said, fine, if I could have anything, I want a place of retreat for priests, religious, seminarians, teens, anyone who wants to draw closer to God. I don’t know how we would do it, but I would love to have a place of retreat for people to come and just rest in Your love.”

She closed her journal, grabbed her bags, drove to the airport, returned her rental car, made it to her gate and pulled out her phone.

She had a text message from her husband, Ben, waiting for her. It was a link to a property for sale in Cottleville: a beautiful home with a large barn and expansive green space.

It was an answer to the calling they’d felt building in their lives for years. They put in an offer that day.

“It really taught me it’s OK to dream,” Lisa said. “It’s OK to share the desires of your heart, and not to keep it generic, because He’s placed that on our hearts.”

A home of hospitality

They named the property Bethany Farms.

And today, it’s just what Lisa and Ben dreamed: a free retreat space for Catholic groups seeking time to grow closer to Christ.

In the Gospels, Jesus goes to the town of Bethany, a few miles outside Jerusalem, to visit his friends Martha, Mary and Lazarus. He enters into their family life, resting and sharing meals with them.

Previously, while the Harrises were living in Ballwin, they befriended a seminarian who was homesick, inviting him to their home for dinner, family events and just to hang out and relax.

“We were out on the deck one night … and he was saying that coming to our home was his Bethany,” Ben said. “It was his way to be able to go and rest and be recharged and rejuvenated so he could go back out again.”

“We both started crying when he said that,” Lisa said, “because it put a word to what we were feeling called to do.”

The Harrises’ call to open their home in hospitality goes back decades. Today, they’re parents of four and grandparents of five. In the early days of marriage, they hosted family and friends for meals. When Ben started volunteering on the Holy Infant youth ministry core team, they opened their home to teens on Friday nights to give them a safe place to hang out and stay out of trouble.

They also started building relationships with the seminarians and young priests who were involved in youth ministry and began inviting them over for dinners, too.

“That’s when the fire really started to light, as far as wanting to serve the religious community, really recognizing that a lot of seminarians are far from home, and they miss their families,” Ben said. “They just kind of attached on to us a little bit like the teens did, because they missed being in a home with a mom and dad and making dinner or barbecuing and listening to music or whatever we’re doing.”

Over the years, they’ve made a particular effort to get to know their parish priests by opening their home in hospitality. Lisa’s face lights up as she recounts the first time a priest friend dozed off on their couch — a sign to her that he truly felt at home there.

“When they take off their shoes, they sit on the couch, and they put their feet up, I’m just like — yes, we have done it. We have broken through,” she said.

Whether it’s a priest, lifelong friend or new acquaintance, Lisa sums up true hospitality in one word: dignity.

“Hospitality is not just about serving people dinner; it’s about how you look at them, how you speak to them, how you call them higher,” she said. “You’re showing them the truth, their true identity in Christ. They are a son or daughter of God, and we treat each other with love.”

From the heart

The barn sits across a small creek from the Harris’ home, easily visible through the back windows. The hay is gone from its floors, replaced by a large meeting space that can hold about 100 people, a kitchen, bathrooms, a stage, sound system, tables, chairs and couches.

After the year-long renovation was finished, Lisa went to adoration at their parish, St. Joseph in Cottleville. She asked God: What do I do now?

“I just hear Him say to me, ‘You keep bringing people to me, and I’ll keep bringing them to you,’” she said.

Sure enough, calls requesting to use the space started coming and haven’t stopped. The Harrises don’t do any advertising — there’s no website, no social media — they pray for the Holy Spirit to send the right people their way (and prayerfully consider every request they get).

“You’ll see sisters walking across (the grounds) praying the Rosary. You’ll see out there in those little blue chairs, priests having confession. You’ll have teens running around,” Lisa said.

Ben and Lisa’s level of involvement with the retreats varies widely. Sometimes, a group comes in and uses the space without much interaction at all. Other times, the couple cooks meals, gives talks, leads small groups and stays up late having fireside chats.

And, on occasion, they join the group for karaoke or dancing. That’s why they added the fog machine and laser lights to the space, after all.

“We have 80 nuns line dancing out in the barn, the Cha-Cha Slide,” Ben said. “Lisa looks at me and goes, ‘How did we get here? Oh, I’m crying.’”

The Harrises are clear that Bethany Farms is not a business; it’s a family ministry.

“We’re not a retreat center, right? We’re just a home. And so it’s again, it’s all stemming from family life,” Ben said. “And I think that is something that we had thought at one time was going to be a distraction, and it actually turned out to be what people enjoy the most.”

The call to hospitality has taken many forms throughout their lives. Bethany Farms is a result of listening to that call and responding as they are able, which looks different now as empty nesters than it did 10 or 20 years ago.

“I don’t want somebody to think they have to have this (kind of property) in order to do this from their heart. It’s the opposite,” Lisa said. “You have to start little, even when you have a one-bedroom apartment. When we first got married, we had the whole family over. Our desire was to have that community, to have everybody over in our one-bedroom apartment, then it moved to the first house, then it moved to the second house, and then it just kept going. It can be in any phase of life, and you don’t have to have an abundance in order to share your heart. Hospitality is sharing a peanut butter sandwich, right?”

Making space for others

On a warm summer evening, Addie Cook arranged chairs around a couch and coffee table as she prepared for her small group gathering. Addie, one of Ben and Lisa’s four adult children and a parishioner at Immaculate Conception in Dardenne Prairie, uses the Bethany Farms barn to host a handful of other young adult women every Wednesday.

Elizabeth Johnson was the first to arrive, greeting Addie and getting comfortable on the soft sectional. Elizabeth and Addie have been friends since childhood, and she spent many days at the Harris’ home, “a super hospitable place in my life,” she said.

“Addie and her parents are all really, really good listeners,” she said. “I think that plays into feeling welcomed. It was just a safe place.”

When Addie and Elizabeth shared a freshman dorm room at Southeast Missouri State University, they took those habits of hospitality with them.

“We decorated the space to have a lot of seating. I always had food out … we would always keep our door propped open,” Addie said. “It was just as simple as making our dorm room homey and inviting people in.”

Now, as a wife and mom of two young children, Addie invites friends over for dinner. She and her husband welcomed Addie’s sister to live with them for two summers in a row. In her office at work, she puts out granola bars and water bottles. It’s a small gesture, after years of watching her mother stock the guest bathroom with extra toiletries for guests who might have forgotten anything.

“Just trying to make people feel like, we thought about you and we prepared ahead of time,” she said.

While the barn is a great place to host a Bible study for several reasons, the physical space isn’t the most important part of welcoming others. It’s how you open your heart and make room for people to come as they are, Addie said.

“I would say the biggest part of making it feel homey and comfortable is just the space that I try to make for the women who attend the study,” she said. “… It’s being able to receive those people well in those moments and just really hear them and listen to them and not pass judgment, or try to give advice and jump in like ‘oh my gosh, I’ve been there, here’s x, y and z things you can do.’ Just trying to give space for it and be like: We are here, and we hear you.”

Bethany Farms is a gift from God, and her whole family does their best to treat it as such, she said.

“It’s really beautiful to do something for God with what God has given you.”

‘We’re just the managers’

On July 26, Bethany Farms was filled with engaged couples on retreat. As Lisa and Ben walked back and forth from their house to the barn, they passed couples spread across the lawn, deep in conversation.

As you look at the property, it’s easy to see it is beautiful, Lisa said. But it’s the people who come here to encounter Christ that give it a richness that wouldn’t be there otherwise.

“I see a couple sitting at this picnic table, there’s another couple over here, and I’m just like ‘Thank you for giving us this opportunity to share this beautiful land, share this barn, share our faith with them,’” she said.

The Harrises have a few more projects in mind for the space, like installing Stations of the Cross on the grounds, creating a Rosary garden or maybe even building a small chapel.

But ultimately, there’s no five-year strategic plan for Bethany Farms.

“We really feel like this is God’s, and we’re just the managers,” Lisa said. “And however long He wants us to be using it for people to draw closer to God, that’s how long we’ll use it.”