Our first in our new series on Hospitality is by Jenna Funkhouser:
I am fifteen years old, volunteering on the streets of my hometown of Portland, Oregon, that February. A houseless man sees me shivering and offers me his own gloves. His gentle care and goodness shatter me. Suddenly, Christ is standing before me.
I am twenty-two, welcoming an international family with a team from my church in Portland. A family from Iraq arrives and collapses into our cars after a nearly five-year journey. They then immediately turn the tables on us and welcome us into their bare apartment. The walls echo with music and soon weave a story of sorrow and laughter. From that day on, they became my teachers.
I am twenty-six, sitting at the feet of Mama Anna and Mama Pauline, the matriarchs of a community in rural Tanzania. Their quiet persistence with government and NGO leaders has finally achieved a source of water and a primary school for the children of their village. My own poverty of love and perseverance is exposed in the face of their redemptive imagination.
I am thirty in Calais, France, watching men and women who have survived incredible odds in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Afghanistan, and Iran get up every morning to care for one another. Mothers who have saved their children from war make us thick, sweet coffee and take turns claiming the role of host like passing around a shawl threaded with fire and light. We stand by icons of the Theotokos together in the darkness. She has never been more near.
I am thirty-one back in Portland, having one of the hardest years of my life. It is the middle of Lent. I have joined a new parish, and hardly anyone knows about these struggles. Yet by their prayers and their gentle, persistent welcome, the community carries me until I am able to walk with them and carry others.
I am thirty-three in France, England, Scotland, and Greece, traveling from monastery to house to monastery to guesthouse and relying entirely on the kindness of strangers. I am in debt to the world, I realize, in ways that can never be repaid. I have met Christ with hundreds of different faces.
Any welcome I offer others is only this: wanting to walk beside Him for a little while, knowing we all carry each other — knowing we shoulder our burdens together (whether or not we see it) and by doing so, bump up against some of the holiest and realest parts of our lives.
I am thirty-four, and what I think now is: I have a lot still to learn about being a stranger.
