In looking at this title you might think, I thought this blog was about food. Have you lost your mind?
In answering those questions yes it is about food and how that topic can be related to our spiritual lives, but the concept in this snip it, is all about the principle of hospitality.
This week has been busy one, but not as busy as some of my previous weeks. At times it is a day at a time filled with to-do list just to make sure I get everything ticked off especially when it is something major. This is when we lose sight of why we are actually doing it. We need to be re focused and change the angle of our perception of the situation.
Shana Niequist talks about this in her book
"Cold Tangerines" celebrating the extraordinary nature of everyday life.
(2007. Zondervan, Grand Rapids, Michigan. pp. 87-90).
A few months ago, in the golden crackle of fall, I woke up early on a Friday morning. I was getting a cold. that month, we hosted a baby shower, a wedding shower and rehearsal dinner at our house. I made a job transition at the church which we all know means you work two entire jobs for a while and call it transition. A good friend got married, another celebrated her 30th birthday, another found out she's pregnant and another adopted a newborn. My husband had his wisdom teeth removed because we had so much extra time that month for elective surgery and on this particular Friday boring, I was 2 weeks from teaching at an event, and had no idea what I was going to say, or what I was going to wear, both of which were causing me just a teeny bit of stress.
My husband needed more gauze for his teeth and more ice cream, and more soup, and while I was going, more strawberries. Okay.
I threw a coat over my pyjamas, flew out the door, and raced through the storm throwing things in the cart. On the way home, I had a phone conversation that totally stressed me out about one of the upcoming events. When I got home, my husband told me I bought the wrong gauze. You would think I could get the right gauze because I had already bought it 7 times that week, but it was indeed the wrong gauze.
I didn't even let him finish what he was saying I stomped out the door, back into the car, still in my pyjamas, and I opened the garage door again. I stopped in my tracks. In the park across the street, one of the tallest tree twice as high as a 2-story house was the brightest most insane, lit -from -within red I have ever seen. And it took my breathe away. for 2 reasons.
1. because it was so beyond beautiful, and
2. because I had not noticed one step of it turning.
I had been in and out of my driveway a zillion times in the last 2 weeks and could not have told you ice the tree was even still- standing or not. As I stood there in the driveway, I realised that I had stopped seeing the most important things to see it.
I saw the to-do list, the accumulation of things in the house that would have to be shoved in closets for the parties, I saw the stack of half-finished ramblings and Post -its all over my desk that were not turning themselves into a brilliant talk like I hoped they would. I saw the pile of things to go to the dry cleaner and the pile of work to be done and the pile of promises I had made and couldn't possibly keep.
I saw the list of meetings and projects at work and the long list of phone calls to return. I had gifts to buy and flights to schedule and oil to change and people to celebrate. But I wasn't seeing the people or the celebrations. I wasn't seeing anything beyond the chaos of my life and my home and my calendar.
We were hosting a baby shower, and I saw the shopping list and the favour ideas and the bookcases to be dusted, but underneath all those things, waiting for me like the red tree, was the real sights to be behold.
Waiting under the things to do was a story to be told.
For almost 3 yrs, Nate and Melissa have been waning to have a child and have pursued all different roads from medical procedures to international adoption. There have been many points on the journey that seemed like the end, because of paperwork, or money or red tape. And then with just a few weeks' notice, Melissa was in the delivery room acting as a birth coach for the woman who chose them as adoptive parents for her baby girl, Selah Grace. That's what the shower was about. Not the favours or the food to be prepared or the things to be put away, but about the story of life and family and hope that it represented.
Hidden under the to-do list for the rehearsal dinner at our house is the story of my sister-in-law, Amy, whose wedding we were celebrating the next day. That night, over chicken norma and tandoori, 2 families told stories and laughed and prayed together, anticipating the next day's ceremony, anticipating the omen when the 2 families would become 1. After a decade of broken, painful relationships, and the scars and heartbreak that go with them, Amy stood looking out over our city, surrounded by both families, as she married Austin, a man who is all of the things she hoped for, and all of the things that those men never were. Amy was a glowing bride, flushed with beauty and even more so with love. They say that some women acquire a new sense of beauty, that their lives take on a new bloom when they are deeply loved, and although my sensibilities prickle at the concept, when I see Amy now, I know that it's true. The day of her marriage to Austin began a new thing in her, a beautiful, lively, hopeful, generous way of living, a women in full bloom. That's the luminous, beautiful thing hiding underneath the blur of the menu and the seating and the candles.
It looked like a full calendar, a whirl of events and to-do lists and grocery lists. But underneath it all, the month was a greatest hits album, a collection of stories, one after another, of the rich and gorgeous ways that God tells his stories through our lives. What looked like a shower or a dinner or one more night to clean up after was actually one of God's best gifts, worth celebrating , worth seeing. What looks like a plain old city street is just that until you lift up your eyes and see the red tree, and then you realise that this is no plain city street. This is a master piece just here for the week. Our very own wonder of the world and I just about missed it.
