Love

Appropriate word for February, but most likely this isn’t the love story that you were expecting.

Recently we started reading a book that Ryan and Jodie sent, Making Room.  All about hospitality and what it mean to be hospitable, the book is quite convicting and at the same time it makes one quite defensive.

Pre-hotel hotel hospitality was filled with entertaining strangers, traveling preachers, and others getting from here to there.  Currently hospitality is entertaining friends and loved ones.  In reading the beginning, I was reminded of the basis of hospitality, Love.

In fact, as you read through Scripture, ‘love’ seems to be a common thought and the imperative.  It encompasses God’s love to us, and our response to His love not only reciprocally but outwardly.  Love is the basis of all things.

So, I started thinking of great loves, what they are and what they produce.  Yes, it’s not always who they are, sometimes it’s what they are.

Karen and I, although a remote possibility, want to start a cute little shop to feed others.  Currently we are collecting dishes, and recipes, ideas and thoughts of exactly what we want.

This is a funny enterprise to me.  Although eating is essential, and from all appearances, I don’t skip meals too often.  I don’t love eating, but more interestingly, I don’t love the actual cooking.  This is a concept that I struggled with for 27 years.  I thought of so many who loved cooking, Mom, Les, Grandma Steele, Karen, and tons of people, me, not so much.

But here’s what I did love and still love, it’s the basis for wanting to build a business framed around cooking.  I love serving.  I love helping.  It’s a lot of fun being with people who love what they are doing.

It’s a concept that though awkwardly communicated, was the truth that was most important of all the  things that I wanted you children to learn.  It’s not the process, e.g. cooking, cleaning, studying, working in general,  it’s the product that the process brings.

You enjoy the process because of what it produces.  I think that if you can ever begin to think like that, and to have an end goal, hopefully one that has eternalness at the core, then all jobs become fun.  Sometimes stressful and even cuss worthy, but in light of the goal, the work is just the way to the goal, and you might as well enjoy the way because that’s the greater part of life.

Love, maybe not what you are doing in it’s purest form, but love that what you are doing is producing an end product.

As I said, I don’t love cooking, but at camp, I loved the reason for cooking.  I loved that campers got food that sustained them for the week so that they could learn God’s Word and have a great time doing it.

I loved it because it was the way I could help in that ministry.  I loved it because it was true evidence that God showed over and over that He is so gracious to, but so much  greater than the vessel He uses.  How weird that people actually liked the food.

I loved it because of the people in the kitchen.  Beginning with Les, sometimes Mom, Grandma Steele and Iris, then on to Karen, Nancy, Lisa, Abbie, Katie, Jodie, even Dad, Andrew, Ryan Jamey and Justin at times,  along with many others.  They loved cooking (maybe they loved serving) or else they pretended well, and I loved being with them.

It’s funny to think that a big goal is to be with Karen in an establishment where the main goal is food.  But I love the idea.  I love that Karen loves to cook, her enthusiasm is contagious, and I love to cook when someone who loves to cook is nearby.  And maybe I love other stuff.  I have learned ordering, quantities, painting, and many random things that I can do in the business.

But most of all it seems that this goal will help others.  Not only with food, a given, but maybe we can employee people who otherwise wouldn’t work, maybe we can serve folks who are hungry out of the profits. (many I’m sure).  It would be fantastic to be a ministry  of hospitality.

I don’t really love cleaning.  I do love a clean looking and smelling house.  I loved that because when we cleaned, people who stayed felt welcome not like they were intruders.  They felt we were prepared for them and cared that they were comfortable.

I don’t love cleaning things out, though I know Katie does, but each thing I look at seems to have either so many possibilities of what it could be or so many memories of what it was, that it’s really hard to get rid of.  Hence we have a storage shed filled to the brim with things that we are currently doing very well without.  I do love that cleaning out brings that calmness that only less clutter can bring.

I don’t love learning new programs on the computer and putting in data.  But I do love that when I did it for Cookeville Times, it was a help to them, (in the end they were mostly helping me)  something they needed for the moment.  And now because of what I learned for them, I can use that to help others.

So in the end cooking,  cleaning out the barn, racking leaves, mulching, mowing endless circles of grass, cleaning and painting rooms, entering data, addressing envelopes, making and folding bulletins, answering the same questions, work in general,  and fixing and cleaning up countless meals was and is fun. It doesn’t really mater what you work at, the end is that entertaining strangers became a reality. I think that nice facilities, good food, service,  organization and function, are all part of the hospitality process. (I’ll have to finish the book to see if we, the author and I, concur)

These were all things that I loved and still love because they are the way to the goal.  To show love for others, not only for those we love, but for some we might not even be aware of.

…don’t be forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unaware…