Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy

*photo above: Dan Bryan brought chicks to our 5pm service last night. He has too many and was sharing them.

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One of the deep impressions Father Greg Boyle has made on me is the idea of delighting in whoever is in front of me – without agenda, not seeing them as a project or charity case or student… but to simply delight in them, as they are, right now.

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I love this thought on hospitality from Zack Eswine…

We are capable of welcoming other human beings just as they are, even when they believe or say, look or smell, other than we want them to. Hospitality graciously transitions us from consuming people to welcoming them without fixing, knowing, and being for them what only God can.

In all our attempts to do for God without waiting for him, we’ve lost our quiet heart, our capacity for treating neighbors with hospitable room rather than using them for our platform or strategic timing and ways. We’ve grown reactive, consuming of others, and hasty, and all of this “for” God.

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Thomas Merton said,

The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy.

That is not our business and, in fact, it is nobody’s business. What we are asked to do is to love, and this love itself will render both ourselves and our neighbors worthy.

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Maybe this is a good way to wrap up this little post on receiving others – a poem by Hafez…

“With That Moon Language”

Admit something:

Everyone you see, you say to them, “Love me.”

Of course you do not do this out loud, otherwise someone would call the cops.

Still, though, think about this—this great pull in us to connect.

Why not become the one who lives with a full moon in each eye

that is always saying,

with that sweet moon language,

what every other eye in this world is dying to hear?