Skip to main content

Solitude and Hospitality

Betty Hollister shares her thoughts on this week's theme of hospitality:

I didn’t read ahead.  Honest.  When I was voicing my opinion last week that solitude should not be an end result, I was still “struggling” with the suffering solitude seemed to cause without obvious benefits for others.  Needless, to say, I loved this week’s devotions starting with the first sentence for Sunday:  Hospitality and solitude keep each other in balance.  It makes complete sense to me that the more room you make for God in your heart, the more you will be compelled to make “room for others.” (p. 60) God is love and by accepting that, I think a person will be led to act out that love to others.  Now, believing that and carrying it out are two different things.  Several statements were great reminders to me this week.  Any lesson that involves Mary and Martha always strikes a note to me about too much emphasis on that To Do List.  In her book, Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World, Joanna Weaver give the humorous example of Martha’s out-of-balance thinking.  She suggests that Martha’s first thought when she heard Jesus was coming to dinner was that if she hurried she could carve the cheese into an ark and serve it with animal crackers.  Balance.  It is all about the balance.  That art of filtering out the fluff and putting your guests’ real needs first.  This idea was reinforced in Monday’s lesson explaining how prayer and solitude keep us serving with a “glad heart” instead of grudgingly or self-righteously.  What a great reminder this is! Ephesians 6:7 ...rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to man,  I need to put that on my fridge right above my weekly calendar and take a daily dose of it. In fact, I think I need to pause and re-read that now instead of rushing through this blog entry, so I can check it off THE LIST to get to the Children’s Sermon I need to do for Sunday and the Bible Study lesson I need to write for Monday.  Oh yes—slowing down, balancing, and serving with a glad heart.  I have worked my way past the “kicking and screaming” to appreciate how good this book has been for me.  

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Holy Saturday

From Rachel Matthews - Today I have been chopping, measuring, mixing, cooking, mixing some more, kneading, baking, waiting, waiting, tasting, arranging, cleaning, preparing.....and preparing....for guests. It is what you do at a funeral. Either you are preparing to serve and comfort the bereaved or, as the bereaved, you are preparing to receive the community, the family, the loved ones to walk with you to the grave and back again. Holy Saturday feels like the days before a funeral. Suspended between death and life, you just carry on. You work, as usual, but not. That's what the women who loved the Rabbi were doing: preparing the spices, arranging the body (Christ's body), wrapping, loving and weeping, and waiting, and waiting and preparing....for guests. I am giddy thinking about the surprise that awaited them - the Guest!! And, I am giddy waiting for our guests to come to our home. My boys won't be here, so there is grief. I miss them so much. But, the new Amer...

John the Baptist: a portrait in solitude

John the Baptist and Jesus were so well grounded in their relationships with God that they found they had to withdraw from the world to reconnect with God. Their faith was strengthened when they were alone with God. Yet, I am not sure that this is the case for each of us. If we are not strong in our faith walk, I am not convinced that being alone helps. I know I need the church, the body of believers to keep my faith alive, be it in corporate worship, studying scripture, comforting one another, and supporting one another ("wherever two or three are gathered in my name" rings true for me.) I am sure that author Havercamp is in any was suggesting that being alone with God as an act of resistance that we do not need the body of believers to uphold us. But I do believe that sometimes the body, the Church, does not always help.  There are churches, like those to whom Paul wrote letters in the New Testament, that are toxic to some believers. Sometimes we are called out of the body...

Mary the Theotokos

From Rachel Matthews.... I have had four pregnancies and three deliveries, three sons. Two of these pregnancies were delivered during the week before Christmas. I was preaching in a small church during the first pregnancy. By the time the Advent season was upon us, I could not wear my white alb at all, only the black Geneva robe that is supposed to hide all things human. Except that it did not hide the large bump that unbalanced my five foot two frame. I could not hide the fact that I was pregnant. Mary ended up in a few sermons that year. The Word made flesh was upon us all. It was too much for one man in my congregation to see a pregnant woman in the pulpit. He stopped coming. I was sad that he left and tried not to take it personally. I guess it was too much to see up close and personal how the Christ-bearer was a flesh and blood woman which made Jesus much too real.   I thought it was really neat to experience a different side of Mary. I had heard plenty about the dem...