Hospitality is hard.  Anyone who has ever hosted an event, organized an outing or held an open house knows the effort this takes.  When you open up your house to others or volunteer to make food for an event or even commit to going to some happening, you are doing just that-committing a part of yourself.  Whether you are sharing of your time, your safe space or cooking from a family recipe that means much more to you than any list of ingredients could explain; you are sharing a part of your experience, letting others glimpse at your values and interests.  This is the brave and under-appreciated part of hospitality-vulnerability. 

The Lord's Prayer is strange and confusing when you think about it.  It's deceptively short, uses a lot of words that we wouldn't in normal cocnversation and is actually a biblical quote from Jesus to his disciples.  The part that really gets me, though, is "lead us not into temptation."  We often think of not eating too much dessert or lying or stealing when we think of temptation--but that's not really what Jesus was trying to convey to his disciples.

‘Community' is a deceivingly complex word.  We use the word without thinking about what its requirements are.  It's a word that I was trying to come to terms with in the midst of a planning meeting for the Waystation-the monthly worship community for young adults in the region. 

I am me and I am not you.  We are finite beings.  We are each bound by the context of our own lives and I cannot get over how important context is.  This morning of November 15^th, 2011 I woke up in my temperature controlled apartment, getting ready to drive in my car to go to a good-paying job that satisfies both my material needs as well as my spiritual and emotional needs.  But from the time I watched an episode of "Mad Men" on my computer before drifting off to a comfortable sleep until my morning drive; much has happened in the world, according to the radio.  I hear many stories on NPR on other realities of how that time was spent.  I hear about how police forcibly removed peaceful protesters from a NYC park, some protesters returned to Oakland's Occupy space and the largest death toll in Syrian protests against their government happened-all while I snoozed under layers of blankets and a lazily rotating ceiling fan.