Travelling vs Hosting

'Real training for service often calls for a hard and often painful process of self-emptying..' 

-Henri Nouwen

I don't have many concrete thoughts about this.  I like travelling, travelling around is what I know, what I've grown up doing, what I desired and sought after as a young woman.  I get tingles of excitement when I step my foot onto new ground.  I feel very connected to the land I am visiting, like physically, emotionally, spiritually.  It's a very multi-sensory thing.  I like to breath in a new place and feel it, as if I was placing a cup to the earth and hearing it's heart beat.  I love to travel to new places and revisit old haunts.

I actually like travelling for the journey as well as the destination, I'm not always travelling out of some great inner desire to help people.  I travel for story, for colour and experiences.  Travelling for me is like a puddle that grows and retreats, sometimes it grows so big and it's edges catch the corner of some foreign shore, sometimes it evaporates and I am in the familiar, or I am in one place for a season of time.  I like to understand these seasons, I like my connection to the land I am in to have meaning.

As 2012 has rolled upon us I knew that our way of travelling was to become hosting.  Our moving was to become stillness our taking of experience was to become waiting.  I mean this in the most spiritual sense possible, as we have chosen to set out feet on this land for a season, we have chosen to be still.  I have struggled to become accustomed to the stillness, but it is what I desired and it still is.  In the unmoving stillness I can create, I can think, I can invite, I can host.

We have our first house guest coming to stay next month.  In the way I have seen travelling as a very spiritual thing, something that goes deep into my soul.  Now we have started to view this guest as the bringer of stories as a very significant spiritual and emotional experience.  There is something very spiritual about being the host.  I don't understand it yet, it's a preparation of the home and food, a preparation of heart to hold the story of another with great gentleness and care.  The host is entrusted with much.  The host is given trust and the host is responsible for drawing the story out of the guest.

This transition from Traveller to Host has given me a lot to meditate upon today.  It's not that I'm worried so much about the physical things we need to prepare  (although I value a holistic approach to these things, eg. preparing the physical arrangements well to create an atmosphere of welcome). 

I instead keep thinking about our home, our lives, our hearts.  Are they trustworthy enough, are we kind enough are we ready to host and create a safe place for people to come and rest.  I have a great desire that in hosting the guest would have a very spiritually rewarding experience.  To feel closer to Jesus each day in our home, to be well rested as they continue on, to share a significant life changing story with us, that will change us.  I believe being a host will make me very rich as I prepare my heart and home for the guests that will come, to choose to serve as a host and create a place of freedom and safety through continually listening to the Father and fostering a place of meeting right here in our four walls.

When I arrived in America, my friends family came to visit us.  We were not in our own home yet and although we were in the role of host, we really were being hosted by this family.  They drew us into their safe place and enabled us to encounter Jesus.  They embodied the hospitality of a host even as they journeyed.  This is something I'd like to learn, this is something worth learning, fostering and developing and then taking out to the streets, to the highways, to the poor to the rich.  

After many years of travelling and being the guest I am learning to host with the view of becoming a host that travels and creates safe places wherever I go - Tea Parties In Dark Places (and I don't mean the political kind).  I am excited for this time of learning, we knew we would be gathering tools during our time here.  I hadn't expected 'hosting&hospitality' to be the first and possibly the most important skill we would be learning.  I suppose though, God is in the business of people and he cares about our most basic needs for shelter and food and community.