HOSPITALITY UNDERSTANDS

We don't need more critics.  These are a dime a dozen.  What we need are sympathizers who care enough to stand with us, instead of run, when we fall very short of the mark which God has called.

Fellowship and relationship within the body of Christ are essential.  Religious activity seems to want to skip the connected-to-others part by focusing upon standards and measures.

Hospitality, a trait even necessary for elders of the church, has a unique personality. It understands others who suffer so deeply that it offers direction and guidance into fruitful labor.

I very much like what Henri Nouwen penned as he connects hospitality with our common struggles.  This is so because shared pain is no longer paralyzing but mobilizing, when understood as a way to liberation.  When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.

Through this common search hospitality becomes community.

To note value in our own pain is not a call to obsess over our sorrows.  But rather reaching out to those who are down finds that we have a meaningful and wonderful new mobility to effectively boost others.  Our agonies do not shut us down.  Instead, they thrust us into compassion for neighbors of hurting hearts with both experience and understanding.

Attention is not for our difficulties to be duly noted; yet, it frees us to give attention to all others with unusual spiritual insight.  Hospitality sympathizes because we have endured similar discouragement.

Jesus understands us best from the Cross.  He became the sin of our independent lies and our dependent false gods.  He absorbed humanities foul sins as gigantic Kitty Litter upon Golgotha.  He knows sin.  He knows us.  He alone knows how to save.

Because we fight the battles of injury and discouragement and raging agonies, we are qualified to offer a hand to our neighbor through the wild and effective means of hospitality.  We can reach because we have been reached.

What every neighbor wonders is, Does anyone understand my demise and failure? We can arise with strong voice, Yes, I do.  Enter meaningful, sympathetic hospitality.