Ronda’s reply

Yesterday, Rhonda wrote to me privately in response to the post Mamma Said There’d Be Days Like This. It was very nice and I liked her insight into offering hospitality. She has permitted me to publish a portion of it that caught my attention.

She described herself reading a magazine many years ago and her reaction to it. The article was about suffering children in Romania who had been abandoned by their mothers (and apparently their fathers and other relatives). There was a picture of a poor abandoned little girl who was about three years old. The picture moved her to recall a passage of scripture and to a new insight as to applying that passage.

For I was hungry and you fed me, I was thirsty, and you gave me drink: I was a stranger, and you took me in: naked, and you clothed me: I was sick, and you visited me… Whoever welcomes a child, welcomes Me… Suffer the little children to come unto Me…

All of a sudden those words shed new light even on being pregnant — to show hospitality to a stranger who has arrived on your “doorstep” hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, sometimes sick… I wondered about that little girl. Where was her momma? And I thought about how every night my little girls climbed in between clean, cool sheets, with full tummies, and prayers, and hugs and kisses, and I realized in that moment that in a way, I was the only thing standing between my girls and the cold, hard world… If I didn’t do for them the things that they needed… who would? I saw what I already knew about being a mother was true, but I saw it in a little different light — that being a mom is not just another job, one of many that we liberated American women can choose, but it is an opportunity to love Christ Himself — a direct response to the words of Jesus about how we are to treat other human beings…

I have never thought of loving a new baby (the stranger in the house) as hospitality (it’s so much fun!). You are certainly welcoming someone new into your life who has very specific needs when you bring home a new baby. In America it seems that everyone is so disconnected from each other, that it is rare to get to practice hospitality. Thanks Ronda for reminding me that true hospitality begins with being “hospitable” to the ones I love right here at home.