Fw: Many Faces of Hospitality

[Guest guest]

----- Original Message ----- From: MARTHA

Tony Lambert

Cc: ParfumGigi@...

Sent: Thursday, July 19, 2001 11:12 PM

Subject: Many Faces of Hospitality

Hi Ladies,

I want to share this article with as many of you as I can. This is another of my brother's 'thoughts' published in 'Laity Connections'. I hope you may all see the relevance of this message to all of our BI Women!

Blessings to all who read this.

MM / NSIF

For The Love of Pilgrims, Journeymen, & Other Strangers

by Don Murdock, Laity Lodge Executive Director

e-mail: dmurdock@...

When introducing food service and housekeeping staff at Laity Lodge, I frequently say, "Hospitality is a high value in scripture. The biblical story of God begins and ends with Him providing hospitality for His people. His unique son, Jesus, was a recipient of excellent hospitality and a provider of exquisite hospitality." After such theological positioning of hospitality, I then enjoy introducing the people who make the word hospitality come alive.

In scripture, hospitality means "love of strangers, pilgrims, those on a journey" (Romans 12:13; Hebrews 13:2). It is a practical love that transforms strangers into friends. Hospitality includes provision of shelter, food, and friendship for travelers on difficult journeys. This is relevant to all of us. The biblical view of the human journey is an arduous pilgrimage full of trials, tribulations, and hazards of all sorts, as well as a purposeful, exciting, and joyous enterprise. In scripture, everyone is call to both accept and provide hospitality.

Hospitality is more than simply providing for others. For those in Christ, becoming hospitable is to be our primary disposition toward others. We are called first to be hospitable people in our hears and then to express hospitality in specific, practical, and relevant ways as our witness to how God is predisposed to each and every one. Hospitable relationship point to God who began His story in scripture by providing a safe place with everything needed, and who culminates His hospitality for His beloved creation around the heavenly banquet table. And, between these bookend episodes, God repeatedly provides for His people, especially in times of crisis. Theologians think of God’s hospitality as His "providence". Providence (pre-video) refers to God’s "seeing ahead". In His "seeing ahead" care, God anticipates people’s needs in order to have waiting for them resources that will be needed in the foreseen crisis. Jesus did this on many occasions. For example, in Mark 14, Jesus told His disciple how to get to the upper room He had already "reserved" for the Passover meal. And, soon after the upper-room meal, during a time of utmost crisis, Jesus reminded them that where He was going would be a place of "many rooms" and that He would get their rooms ready ahead of time for their final homecoming. Here Jesus was embodying His Heavenly Father’s way with us from the very beginning of our story. He is no only walking beside us, but also out in front of us, preparing the way.

For Laity Lodge, this understanding of hospitality has some veery specific applications. Being sensitive to the nature, magnitude and weight of burdens guests are bearing, we plan well in advance for their nurturing and feeding. We do what we can to make it a safe place in which people can breathe deeply and give themselves permission to be nurtured in a variety of ways. We plan for provisions that nurture and strengthen the human ‘soul’, ie., everything that makes a human being truly humane. These provisions relate to all aspects of being persons created in the image of God. We nurture people biblically, physically, emotionally, relationally, cognitively, and aesthetically. This is why retreats include teachers, musicians, artists, relational experts, leisurely and well-balanced meals, restful schedules, hammocks, tennis courts, hiking trails, and a river full of clean refreshing water, And we affirm God’s primary gifts of healing, i.e. tears and laughter in the context of loving relationships.

When we "see ahead" and prepare in anticipation of our guests’ needs, strangers become friends. Then when they depart to enter the roadway of their lives, they will do so with renewed strength, enhanced hope, and fresh appreciation for one’s true identity and final destiny.

Lest we slip into some unrealistically lofty notion of hospitality, let me simply remind you how important receiving hospitality was for Jesus. I think of the hospitality He received from the unnamed woman in Luke 7, and the various occasions He was in the home of , Martha, and Lazarus. When I read these stories carefully, I appreciate how these and other occasion comforted and strengthened Jesus in His journey.

Although it is important to know how to provided excellent physical hospitality, the real challenge is to let the real God of all hospitality indwell our hearts with such thoroughness that we finally become people whose hearts and souls are predisposed toward being hospitable to all of God’s people, especially the strangers among us.

Source: ‘Laity Connections’, Summer 2001

Martha Murdock, DirectorNational Silicone Implant FoundationDallas, Texas Headquarters

Purposes for which the Corporation (NSIF) is organized are to perform the charitable activities within the meaning of Internal Revenue Code Section 501©(3) and Texas Tax Code Section 11.18 ©(1).Specifically, the Corporation is organized for the purposes of education and research of Silicone-related disease.