Spirituality & Hospitality

This past week has been interesting and challenging in a number of good ways. We have spent a lot of time - intentionally and not - getting to know each other, ourselves, and those around us in different ways. For instance, I had a couple conversations with a man who lives here at Jesus People USA (JPUSA) about the spiritual realm and the gifts of the Holy Spirit - his personal testimony regarding the spiritual realm intrigued me and stretched my understanding of having a personal relationship with the Spirit.
My team going to South Africa also had a wonderful opportunity to talk to a former RAD participant (the RAD program was the predecessor to the Radical Journey Program) who spent two years in South Africa. His experience in South Africa was fascinating to hear, but I especially enjoyed hearing about his passion for a deeper understanding of spirituality and spiritual gifts. I am so excited to think of how deeply I can grow this year in my faith and understanding.

We have also been working our way through spiritual discplines - things like prayer, hospitality, journaling/blogging, and silence - as a larger group. This past week, on Monday, we practiced hospitality. This assignment was very open-ended, and I set off with a member of the Paraguay team to find opportunities for hospitality in downtown Chicago. We soon realized that hospitality is more difficult than it sounds, especially when you are not home. We struggled with defining hospitality as something more specific than merely being nice or caring, and ended up doing a series of small things; we bought food for a homeless man, took some pictures for families in Milennium Park, cleaned up some litter on the sidewalk. I learned that hospitality is harder than it sounds, and that it is especially difficult to be welcoming and caring when you have no space to welcome people into. At the end of the day I felt challenged, but definitely grateful for the experience.