Hospitality + Paying attention: To love and to be loved.
“When I pay attention to you, I know how to serve you. When I serve you, I show my love to you.”
I wrote this line a few years ago to describe the deep connection between paying attention and hospitality. I haven’t mastered this. One particular weakness is my own issues with screen time. I, like many, enjoy my phone far too much, going to it out not out of necessity but habit. While I highly value silence, I realize that for many months now I’ve run away from it. Only recently, working in the garden actually, have I started to turn back toward the daily rhythms of silence. In part because the noise became too much - we were not made for constant input, and yet there I was, constantly feeding myself and then wondering why I was so disheveled and particularly impatient with my children and their own neediness. I realized that for my own sanity, health and desire to not be the always impatient - and sometimes just angry - parent, spouse or friend, I needed to make a change.
Entering the silence, even for just a few moments in a day, is re-teaching me how to pay attention. To attune my mind to what is actually in front of me. I’m learning to engage the senses again. Feeling. Tasting. Seeing. Hearing. Smelling. I notice more. And I realized that my running away from silence is really just me running away from what I truly need to turn toward. Perhaps you can relate?
Hospitality is about both giving and receiving. To show hospitality well, we must know how to receive it well. First from God and then from others. When you don’t know how to pay attention, you can’t truly give or receive. Not genuinely anyway. I suppose many of us can do things without really having our heart, mind or spirit involved but rather we move through our days with automated, lifeless actions. But who wants to live like that? We weren’t made to live like that.
Paying attention gives us a vibrancy. An awareness of something greater. Never in my life did I consider myself or have aspirations to become a “bird watcher”. And I don’t know what happened, but lately I’ve found myself sitting on one of our stumps around the firepit, staring at the birds as they fly in and out of our many trees. Whistling and calling all throughout the day. I see this activity, the fluttering of wings, the quick movements and the blues and browns of their feathers with their white chests puffing. I sit amazed at how they frolick all about, unsure of exactly why they move about the way they do, but I’m delighted all the same. I start taking out my Merlin Bird App to use the sound ID to identify which bird makes which sounds. I sit and stare in awe. And this awe of the birds leads to an awe of the One who made the birds. It seems so childish sometimes. My delight in something so small. But if to be mature means to no longer pay attention to such things, then I do not want it. I wish to be immature for the rest of my life. Because the majestic nature of a bird in flight speaks to something so much greater than I can understand. The mechanics. The intricate details. The God who knows it all is the same One who calls you, me, us, by name. And we can realize all of this simply by paying attention.
How does this relate to hospitality? Two thoughts -
Paying attention allows us to care for others well. It forms us into people of presence and have deep awareness. And
Paying attention allows us to be cared for also. To love. And to be loved. That is what I’ve learned through simply paying attention.
May you be encouraged to do the same.
Until next time,
Alexa
