Hospitality: How Big is Your Heart?

After dinner one night, at a home where Henri Nouwen was visiting, a little girl named Megan asked a question she'd been asking lately after seeing the "big" buildings in New York City and hearing that God, too, was mysteriously both "big and small." She turned to Henri and asked "How big is God?" Henri replied, "God is as big as your heart." She continued to probe: "And how big is your that?" Henri smiled and gestured with his large hands, "Your heart is big enough to contain the whole world."

-From a friend of Henri Nouwen in The Heart of Henri Nouwen

Hospitality is not a method of making God and our way into the criteria of happiness, but the opening of an opportunity to others to find their God and their way.

-Henri Nouwen

We are able to confront difficult questions, explore underlying assumptions, and create what we care about more readily in environments that evoke warmth, friendliness, authenticity, and real conversations than in environments that are less hospitable to the human spirit.

-Juanita Brown in The World Cafe

For Your Consideration and Reflection:

• Recall a time in your life when you experienced radical hospitality from another. How did it make you feel? What made the hospitality radical?

Not Home Work, but Home Adventuring:

• Over the next month, search out examples or artifacts of hospitality in your day-to-day journey. What does it look like? How do customs vary?