the kids are alright

Hospitality is a funny thing.  It seems like an easy enough concept to grasp but it is really much more complicated than I previously had held.  Don't get me wrong, I have experienced hospitality at home in many ways and from many of you but today I realized something.  Hospitality is a two way street.  Now in our culture it is normative to begrudgingly accept welcome.  We ask three or four times if the welcomer is sure that it is ok that we are "putting them out."  At least I do.  And I know that I would feel obliged to help if someone was serving me.  This is not really a bad thing.  But today I came to see that hospitality is completed by the one toward whom the hospitality is being extended.  Accepting hospitality with very little questioning (if any) in this culture really blesses the person who is serving.  We give the welcomer the great obligation and blessing to be able to serve and since there is no person without people the opportunity will someday soon be afforded to the other.  As Pippi's mom says, "It's fine.  It all works out in the end."  This is true.  We, I mean I and those like me in the Western context often feel this ridiculous debt to the people who get to serve.  Since community is not our center and we put our faith in the myth (lie) of independence we are not sure if we will be given the chance to repay our debt of servitude.  So, I believe a proper response to this realization is to seek to serve at all times and realize that that may look like accepting the service of others.  Accepting the other's service is akin to the Indian term "Namaste."  This has been explained to me as something like "I honor the God within you" (please correct me if I am mistaken). The good news is that God is a God who serves.  By accepting the service of others when appropriate, we are letting God be made manifest in the other thereby letting them live as fully as possible.  Of course, there are times when it is simply rude to expect that we are to be served or to feel that we are somehow worthy of service or entitled to it.  This is surely pretty easy to differentiate most of the time.  

I write this after having spent the day in a village near the seminary.  As is always the case of Church here, we spent the first hour or so singing with the four choirs that showed up today.  This was interesting as only one was expected.  There were nearly three hundred people there.  How this little village accommodated for so many people is beyond me.  We and the other visitors were given seats of honor (plastic chairs instead of a small wooden bench) and babies and small children were passed to us throughout the service.   A meal was served after the five hour service during which there were multiple baptisms.  The food and service was provided only by the people living in this very very small village.  The westerner in me wanted to help and I am sure that it would have been okay, but we were told by one of the men that it is their joy to serve the sisters and brothers that worship with them.  What unity.  What joy.  What radical hospitality.  Namaste!