Matt and Michelle Norman
CBF Field Personnel, Barcelona, Spain
This year has been a good year. We have had a challenging year filled with change, challenges, anticipation, disappointment and hard work; but we have also enjoyed it. When I reflect on what has made life good, I realize the reality of the full range of human experiences is what makes it all worthwhile—from hard to easy, heavy to light, sad to joyful, angry to calm, painful to comfortable, new to normal. Right now, that’s what’s saving my life.
Our ministry activities in the Barcelona area, as well as in the wider European community, involve nurturing spaces that express the fullness of God’s love—spaces where people can come to recognize both themselves and others as valued creations of God and live out this understanding in practical ways in their everyday lives. So, one might say that hospitality or nurturing hospitality is the core of this ministry. But hospitality can have different meanings and so I want to submit the understanding that Parker Palmer offers, “A learning space needs to be hospitable not to make learning painless but to make the painful things possible, things without which no learning can occur—things like exposing ignorance, testing tentative hypotheses, challenging false or partial information, and mutual criticism of thought.”
This understanding helps one imagine the fullness of hospitality. It also helps one awaken to the fact that in any given space, the host and those hosted can at any moment change places. Indeed, when one shifts from being a host to being hosted, or vice versa, this is often a lifesaving moment.
This year, I have been saved by simple actions like asking a new friend how they see God working in their life and being asked the same question; like being invited into homes to share a meal; listening to pastors and church leaders share what they are learning and, in their stories, seeing God in a new way; like crying with mothers as they seek a better life for themselves and their children; like watching refugee kids run and play while shouting out loud in broken English, “Happy, happy, happy, happy!” These experiences and so many like them are moments of transformation in my life, where God is nurturing new life. And isn’t that what salvation is?
Pray, Practice, Ponder
Ponder a time when you recently gave or received “the fullness of hospitality.” It may be a small or simple moment, like the ones listed above. Share this moment with a friend, or hold it in your heart and mind today, allowing God to use it to nurture within you the fullness of God’s love.
Pray...Give...Go.