On Sunday nights, my family’s apartment in Istanbul is loud in the best way. Chairs scrape the tile floor, the tulip-shaped tea glasses never quite stay full, and there is always one more hand reaching across the table for bread. If you opened the window, you would hear the distant foghorns from the Bosphorus and, later, the call to prayer drifting through the narrow streets. By the time we stack the plates by the sink, the room smells of lemons, tomato sauce, and contented exhaustion.

And then, my phone lights up.

Sometimes it is a man drowning in debt, who needs to “talk just a bit” before he goes home to his family. Sometimes it is a woman who hasn’t slept properly in months, whose loneliness spills out in floods of late-night voice messages. Sometimes it is a young person fighting addiction, asking if they can “crash for a while” again until things settle down.

The table is cleared, my wife is already loading the dishwasher, and the children are finally asleep. My body wants nothing more than silence and a cup of tea in the dark. But the little screen in my hand reminds me: There is more to do. You could stretch a bit further. You could answer one more call, open the door one more time, make the sofa into a bed for one more night.

Part of me hears Jesus: “If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who begs from you, and do not refuse the one who would borrow from you” (Matt. 5:41–42). But another part of me hears the heartbeat in my ears and thinks: if I keep going like this, there will be nothing left of me to give to anyone.

In those moments, the questions are painfully simple and painfully sharp. What does Christian hospitality look like after you are already tired? How do you welcome people in real crisis – loneliness, debt, addiction – without burning out or becoming their therapist?  When Jesus calls us to walk the second mile, does that mean we never get to go home?

Somewhere between the fear of being selfish and the fear of collapsing is the courage not just to spend ourselves but to admit that we are not Christ; the courage to say no for his sake, not just for our comfort.

In our culture today, there are two prevailing scripts for how we should live with and care for other people.

One script says: Be available. Be there for your friends. Open your home. “Do life together.” In Christian circles, this often comes wrapped in beautiful terms: radical hospitality, Christlike compassion, the feast in the kingdom of God, universal brotherhood. We share our bread with the hungry, and our homes with strangers. Sometimes, if we are honest, it also comes with a heroic fantasy: I will be the one who always picks up, who always has a spare bed, who never turns anyone away.

The other script sounds very different. It speaks in a language we know as “therapy-speak”: bandwidth, emotional labor, toxic people, cutting off, self-care. It says: Protect yourself. Don’t let anyone drain you. This is not your responsibility. Say no. Set firm boundaries. Guard your energy.

Therapy and the language around it can be real gifts. Good counselors and clear limits have helped many of us survive situations that might otherwise have crushed us. The problem is not that these words exist, but that they can quietly replace an older vocabulary of communal care – neighborly duty, mercy, and covenant. “Bandwidth” is a useful concept for machines, but a poor substitute for covenant love among people.

Often, the second script is a reaction to genuine wounds. A generation that was told to be endlessly useful – to employers, to institutions, sometimes even to churches – has discovered how exhausted and embittered that can leave a person. Saying “I don’t have the bandwidth” can be a clumsy way of saying, “I am not infinite. I have limits.”

But if we are not careful, this language can harden around us like armor. We begin to measure every invitation, every need, every knock at the door against one metric: What will this cost me emotionally? And once that calculation becomes primary, it is not long before “boundaries” become a convenient excuse for withdrawal, even abandonment.

As a Christian, I find myself pulled between these two scripts. On the one hand, I know the call to unselfish love is real; Jesus does not promise a life carefully insulated from other people’s mess. On the other hand, I know what it is to hold my phone up late at night, too tired to care for my own family properly, feeling quietly angry at the people I am supposed to be helping.

If hospitality meant being permanently open, permanently reachable, permanently “on,” then the only honest options would be burnout or hypocrisy. We would either run ourselves into the ground, or we would keep using the language of hospitality while quietly disappearing behind the screen of our own “boundaries.”

There has to be another way.

When I turn to the Gospels with these questions, I am struck by how Jesus refuses to fit either script.

At first glance, his commands sound impossibly generous: go the second mile, give to anyone who begs, expect nothing in return. He tells his disciples to invite people to their meals who are unable to pay them back. He stops for the bleeding woman in the crowd, notices the short tax collector in the tree, sees the hungry crowds and refuses to send them away. There is nothing minimalist about his love.

And yet the same Jesus is constantly withdrawing. After driving out an impure spirit from a man in Capernaum and healing many of the sick, diseased, and demon-possessed that same evening, very early the next day, while it is still dark, Jesus gets up and goes to a deserted place to pray – away from the multitudes desperately looking for him (Mark 1:35–36). As news of more miracles spreads and “great crowds” press in to be healed, “Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed” (Luke 5:15–16). And of course, there is Jesus’ command for solitary prayer: “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen” (Matt. 6:6).

Jesus embodies both approaches: He goes the second mile, and then he goes up the mountain alone. He feeds the crowds, and then he sends them away. He allows desperate people to interrupt him, and then he disappears to pray where he won’t be found. What if this is not a contradiction but a pattern?

Jesus is not playing the hero who must be available to everyone, everywhere, all the time. Nor is he the carefully self-protective individual who guards his “bandwidth” above all. He is the Son whose yes and his no both pass through his relationship with the Father. His hospitality is not an endless series of emergency responses but a way of life that includes worship, the Sabbath, and genuine rest.

For those of us trying to follow him today – in parishes, in city apartments, around kitchen tables – this offers both relief and challenge. Relief, because it means we are not called to be miniature saviors. Challenge, because it means our limits are not primarily about comfort but about faithfulness: What am I free to give, and what must I entrust to God and to others? Learning to say no in that light is not cowardice; it is a refusal to attempt to be everything for everyone.

I learned this lesson the hard way in my own neighborhood in Istanbul.

A few years ago, a man I will call Omar began knocking on our door. Omar was a refugee, caught in the bureaucratic limbo that swallows so many lives in this city. He had no work permit, a sick mother, and a pile of mounting debts.

At first, I tried to be the hero. When he called at midnight, I answered. When he needed money, I scrambled to find it. When he needed to vent about the injustice of the system, I sat and listened for hours, nodding until my neck hurt, absorbing his frustration into my own body. I thought this was what it meant to “give to the one who begs.”

But within two months, I was hollowed out. I began to dread the sound of the doorbell. I snapped at my children. When I prayed, I could feel nothing but resentment. I was trying to be God for Omar, and because I am not God, I was failing Omar and destroying myself.

One Tuesday evening, he came over. I was exhausted. As I heard his steps on the stairs, my stomach tightened. I pictured him collapsing in our hallway, weeping, asking for more money I did not have. I almost didn’t open the door. For a moment I stood there, my hand on the handle, my heart pounding with a strange mixture of guilt and anger.

But I opened it. I invited him in, and I said something I had been afraid to say: “Omar, I cannot fix your debt today. I have no solution. But the tea is fresh, and we are about to eat lentils. You can sit with us, but I am too tired to talk about the problems tonight. We can just be here.”

There was a pause. I expected disappointment, maybe a flare of anger. Instead, the hunted look in his eyes softened. The frantic edge in his voice disappeared. He took off his shoes slowly, as if he had been wearing them for miles, sat at the table, and wrapped his hands around the warm glass of tea as if it were a small stove in winter. While we ate, he wordlessly reached for my youngest daughter’s plastic dinosaur and made it march across the tablecloth. She giggled. He smiled, just a little.

We didn’t solve a single problem that night. No forms were filled out, no plans made. But something in the room changed – first in him, then in me. He didn’t want me to be his savior; he wanted to know he wasn’t invisible. He didn’t need my frantic activity; he needed a place to rest his head, just for an hour, outside the war zone of his own life.

Another evening, I visited an elderly widow from our parish who was undergoing cancer treatment. I brought her soup, thinking I was the one doing the work of mercy. As I rose to leave, she stopped me and asked if she could pray for my family. She laid her trembling hands on my head and gave a blessing for my wife, my children, and our home. The sick woman had become the intercessor, and I was the one being carried.

“We have this treasure in jars of clay,” Saint Paul writes, “to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us” (2 Cor. 4:7). Our homes, our tables, our own tired bodies are just that – jars of clay. Cracked, fragile, and ordinary. But it is precisely through these cracks that the light of a power greater than our own can seep out.

Later that night, after I walked home from the widow’s building, I closed our front door behind me and turned the key in the lock, listening to the solid click of wood and metal. For a moment I just stood there in the hallway, shoes still on, hearing the muffled noises of my children in the next room. The door, the walls, the ceiling – this little apartment in Istanbul – suddenly felt like more than a few humble rooms under a roof. It was a small, bounded space – where Omar could rest for an hour, where my children could sleep without fear, where my wife and I could argue, forgive, and start over. As I paused, looking around me, I realized that the walls were not only there to keep others out; they also kept us in – and held us together.

This, I realized, is what boundaries are meant to do.

We often think of boundaries as walls that keep people out. But architecturally, walls are what create the space that people occupy. Our boundaries need such an architectural structure. They need a floor as a foundation, a roof for protection, and walls for limits.

Therapeutic boundaries often function as lines that say, “This is where I end, and you begin; this is what I cannot carry for you.” Those lines can be necessary and good. Christian hospitality needs boundaries too, but of a slightly different kind: not lines that say, “Stay away from me,” but walls that say, “Here is a room where you can rest, and here are the edges of this room.” If we have no boundaries, we are not a home; we are a thoroughfare. And you cannot rest in the middle of a busy street.

This is not selfish. It is the recognition that we are creatures, not the Creator. When we accept our limits, we are actually confessing our faith. We are saying, “God is God, and I am not. I can go to sleep, and the world will be held by hands stronger than mine.”

So how do we practice this in the reality of a parish or a busy apartment block? Over the years, through trial and much error, our household has slowly cobbled together some rudimentary guidelines.

The first thing we’ve learned is to offer presence rather than solutions. When someone comes to us in deep crisis, everything in me is drawn to playing the role of amateur social worker – to fix the addiction, the marriage, the legal troubles. Usually, I am not qualified. Now, when I can remember, I say something like: “I cannot fix this. But I will sit with you in the ashes.” We put the kettle on. We set an extra plate. We listen, and when it seems right, we pray. The technical work is the concern of lawyers, doctors, and counselors. The soul work of showing people they are not alone belongs to the church.

We also began, almost by accident, to lean on what we now call “the third thing.” We noticed that face-to-face intensity drained us quickly. Sitting across from someone, locked in eye contact and talking about “issues,” made everyone more anxious. So we began to invite people into shared tasks. “Come peel potatoes with us.” “Walk to the park with us so we can take the kids to the swings.” “Help me fold this laundry while we talk.” Shared, simple work allows for silence. It normalizes our relationship. It shifts the dynamic from helper and victim to two friends working together.

Slowly, we have learned to guard certain hours as a kind of household Sabbath. Early nights, certain days off, and times when messages can wait until tomorrow have been determined – not as rigid rules, but they are real. Knowing there is a time when the door is closed allows us to be more joyful and generous when the door is open. Jesus retreated to the mountain so he could return to the plain. We need our mountain moments, not as excuses to withdraw forever but as the place from which we are sent back again.

We have learned to stop pretending that our family is the church. Not every need that knocks on our door is meant to stay within our four walls. Sometimes the most faithful response is: “We can walk this stretch with you, and then we will ask others to walk the next.” We introduce people to our parish priest, to a trusted older couple, to a church group that visits the sick. The body of Christ has many members; hospitality is not the project of one heroic household but the shared work of a community. And because even shared work can feel crushing, we have had to learn to hand burdens back. When a guest leaves, their sorrow often lingers like heavy air in the living room. Before we go to sleep, we try to pray that weight away from our shoulders and back into God’s hands. We name the person, we name the need, and we say out loud: “Lord, this is Omar’s debt. It is too heavy for us. You take it.” Sometimes we also ask a friend, or our parish priest, to carry the prayer with us, so that even the intercession is shared.

These practices are simply ways of admitting, again and again, that love has a shape – that our yes needs a frame if it is going to last more than a season.

Ultimately, Christian hospitality is not a test of endurance. It is a signpost.

If we burn out, we become bitter, and a bitter host is worse than no host at all. But if we can know our limits – if we can build small, sustainable rooms of hope – we offer something far more powerful than a 24-hour crisis hotline.

We offer a glimpse of a kingdom where there is enough time, enough bread, and enough mercy. We offer a table where we are all guests, eating from the hand of the only host who never grows tired.

In a world that worships productivity and treats exhaustion as a badge of honor, choosing to rest in God is not just self-care; it is a form of resistance. To set a boundary for the sake of love – to say, “I will not try to be the savior here; I will let Christ be Christ” – is an act of moral nerve that quietly refuses the lie that everything depends on us.

So let the phone ring. If you can, answer it. If you cannot, let it go to voicemail and trust that God is still awake. Let the screen dim again. Then, pour the tea, break the bread, and sit down. Notice the crumbs on the table, the empty chair, the small, stubborn warmth of the glass in your hand.

The work of mercy begins right there – at the small table, in the small room, where a tired disciple dares to say both “yes” and “no” with the same prayer on his lips: “Lord, this is your house. Show me how to welcome and show me when to rest – so that tomorrow, I can love again, not as a little god but as your servant.”