Fifteen minutes before our official start time on the opening day of the Friday Café, the door opened and our first two guests walked in.
So many hours of planning and preparation had gone into this moment, and I felt totally unready. We hadn’t quite finished setting up. We hadn’t had time to fully prep our volunteers. The coffee wasn’t made—I’d underestimated how long it would take to heat the water in the big coffee maker.
But most of all I felt unready because I WAS unready. From the moment our guests walked in, the whole Café was out of my hands.
All I’d been doing with all the hours and hours and weeks and months of prep was creating a kind of container for the Holy Spirit. From now on what happens inside that container on Fridays from 1:00–5:00 is no one’s business but God’s. The rest of us are there to participate and to let be.
And sure enough, simple as the Café was and is, the Spirit made it so much more.
It’s all spiritual practice, right? Just like prayer and meditation. Discipline and practice and preparation all for the sake of making room for God. It’s all really just the practice of hospitality—and it is practice. It takes real work to welcome God in and be present to God being present to us.
I’m sure you’ve all heard that story about CBS anchor Dan Rather and Mother Teresa. Rather once asked Mother Teresa what she said during her prayers. “I listen,” she said. So Rather turned the question and asked, "Well then, what does God say?" Mother Teresa smiled. “He listens.”
It sounds like so little. But now we know, from reading her often anguished journals, that listening is hard work and a kind of dying—a laying down of ourselves, of our own efforts and accomplishments, everything we’ve done to get to that moment, in order to welcome Love without filters or conditions, not even the expectation that we will sense Love’s presence. Sometimes we will, sometimes we won’t. Learning to let that be is part of the total hospitality we are growing into.
Because what Love can do when we make room is so much more than anything we can ask or imagine.