“Daddy? Daddy?” I heard my cue that Micah was up from his nap. I snapped my laptop closed and started down the hall, “Micah, are you awake?” (I feel I can get away with asking ridiculously obvious questions when addressing a two-year-old – oh excuse me, two-and-a-HALF.) “Yea!” He called out just as I was reaching his door. There he stood, hair disheveled, eyes still sleepy and a nose that has been marathon training for more than a week, “Where are we going tonight?” he asked. I stopped for a moment, kinda stunned. First, I was impressed with his construction of his question. No grammatical errors, quite good pronunciation, and I’m quite sure that he knew exactly what he was asking. This past year, and especially these past few months, I have been impressed at Micah’s ability, that is, the two-year-old mind’s ability to pick up, understand, and use language. Even when he makes mistakes, the linguist in me often sees exactly why his brain took that particular route in creating the clause, and I’m further amazed.
Getting past the feeling of “Wow, God clearly programmed our species for complex verbal communication,” I was struck by something else in my son’s question, “Where are we going tonight?” It was asked with excitement, built on the recognition of a definite pattern he had observed. If he had had the words to express it, he would have said, “You know, last night we went to the house of the man that gave me the big black car, the night before that was the house of the nice lady who had singing penguins and had wrapped Christmas presents for Grace and me under her tree…and the night before that was church after which we packed out the Mexican restaurant. You know, so where are we going tonight?” It was a valid question, for during the eight weeks that we stayed down in Texas, we were probably not home about 80% of the evenings. That’s 5 or 6 nights a week with dinner engagements, not your typical routine for an introverted family like ours, especially with a brand new baby.
So why? Simply put, it was an onslaught of incredible expressions of hospitality, dear friends and a community of believers intentional about ministering to us. And boy have we been blessed. Three families opened up the empty rooms in their homes and shared their space in incredibly unselfish ways. Our hosts bought our groceries, five people brought over meals, about fifteen households hosted us for dinner at their homes, and there were at least a dozen times we went out to eat with friends (NONE of which were we allowed to pay our bill!). At first, the busy evening schedules were honestly a bit overwhelming and we didn’t quite know how to manage Micah’s bedtime being stretched night after night. But, as the madness became routine, we were overwhelmed with the blessing of it all: excellent home-cooked meals with no food prep, no clean up, and gracious hosts who emptied their toy closets for our busy little Micah to explore.
As I think through the blessings of these past two months, I’m blown away to realize that this hospitality saved us easily over $2000 in housing and food costs. In addition we were blessed with the hours upon hours of food preparation and clean up time. But most of all, we were blessed by the friendships and love of what we have come to know as our Texas family. We pray that God will faithfully return similar blessings to all those who so generously blessed us in these past weeks.
