Strangers are friends not yet made...

I have guests at the moment, not people I knew personally beforehand. I have more than enough physical space in the church owned house.

What is hospitality? Sharing the bread we have, actually I get back a lot too, my overgrown garden mown, others sharing the cooking... 

But there is the balance - keeping safe, as a woman alone welcoming the stranger is a serious matter, not to be done without care.

And yet -
I think back to all the times I have lived with people not of my choosing, and often strangers. From university flat allocation to when I arranged a 6 month unpaid 'job' in a church in Australia in exchange for bed and board.  Actually since I was 18 I have only lived alone for 5 years, and with 4 years back at parents that leaves over a decade living with people I didn't choose, people who were strangers at first. Of course some of that was with a locked personal room but I also remember the times that people welcomed me into their homes.  Ok I may have come with references, a student on a placement etc, but I was still a stranger.

And those who care about my wellbeing now were glad of the welcome I recieved in other places. Is there inconsistency there? Not really because then they worried about me going into a stranger's place, now they worry about the strangers coming to my place.  Sometimes those who love you are simply born to worry.

But if by welcoming others I can pass on the grace and hospitality that I have been shown by strangers then that chain of grace can carry on.

Whilst being wise to real risks we must still dare to care.

Ants and frogs?

I mowed the back lawn, otherwise known as the meadow, the grass having reached a foot high. Correction, I have half mown the lawn - the mower jammed so often and cut out that I gave up.

I have a pond - when the the grass is low you can even get to it!  The pond has frogs, and therefore so does my long grass meadow of a back lawn. When mowing the grass was moving and I would kick through it to encourage the frogs and froglets to move away from the danger.  On the other hand I found in the long grass impressively tall ants' nests - and broke them and added anti-ant powder. Why the difference?

Both ants and frogs are part of nature's ecosystem, yet I seek to save one and to kill the other - why? and how did I decide one has more value that the other, at least to me?  Am I simply a sucker for seeing the weak but determined froglets jumping away from the mower? Maybe. The vulnerable have a way of drawing our hearts (and I'm sorry but the ants are too small to feel for, despite watching 'A Bug's Life').

The other thing I noticed was the tendency of the frogs to jump away towards other long grass, not understanding the mower would follow them there. Whereas safety was actually in the scary openness of the section just mown/mangled.   How often do we retreat into the familiar when life is tough when actually life and hope may be in the places that seem more risky and scary?  And will we find the bravery to jump into the open?