Christ The King Church is a Hospitality Zone:
Gratitude and Love

by Cathy Moreland

Part of our 2008 mission emphasis is to cultivate a culture of Christian hospitality throughout our congregational life, including our facilities, our greeting of visitors and our interactions with each other.

Join us in expressing the hospitality of our congregation through awareness, learning, and the practicing of new hospitality skills. This month we look at gratitude and love in hospitality. Try these exercises.

Gratitude, appreciation, or thankfulness is a positive emotion or attitude in acknowledgment of a benefit that one has received or will receive (www.wikipedia.org). Sometimes fear and pain keep us from letting someone know how much we appreciated what they did. We all need affirmation to value and appreciate our own goodness and giftedness and because we are interconnected, we affirm others.

• Write down a gratitude you would have liked to have heard from someone, but never did. Something that you did that you really would have appreciated the other person’s saying or acknowledging.
• What do you think kept them from saying the appreciation you would like to have heard?
  How did this affect you?
• What keeps you from sharing an appreciation or gratitude with someone?

Love is a decision and a commitment. Something we give – not something we go out and “get”. Self love must be real to us first, then through prioritizing we balance our own and others’ needs. Erich Fromm writes “I must artfully decide when it is time for kindness, when encouragement is needed, and when the person or myself is ready to be challenged”. We are not doormats, nor is it hospitable to rescue and enable others. Being open and honest and letting others hit bottom when needed is offering a gentle hospitality.
Try this exercise:

• Think of someone who really irritates you or has what you consider obnoxious behavior.
• Write out what you think it must be like to be that other person with the obnoxious behavior. How might they feel and what need could the behavior be meeting?
  How do you feel towards that other person now?
• Write out what it is like to live with one of your own habits you’ve tried to change. How do you feel towards yourself now and what underlying need might the behavior be meeting?

This exercise helps us be empathic towards ourselves and others and empathy is prelude to love. Empathizing is a way to give love. God’s gift of love is generated inside ourselves, and that’s how we “get” love.

Prayer: Pray for the desire and grace to be a loving person.

Ask: What is the loving thing to do?

Love is all that God asks of us. Love is what heals. Love is an inside job.

Enjoy the summer! The next Hospitality Zone will focus on a Language of Nonviolence in hospitality. Please send any comments and put “Hospitality” as the subject.

Last updated: 2008-06-03