Accommodations

As you reflect back over your life, what are some of the most unique accommodations you have experienced? As a child, youth or adult? Have you experienced less than adequate accommodations at one point or another?

I cannot help but pray and contribute as best possible to those in our community and particularly in Pamlico County whose accommodations have been devastated. Many have lost their homes, furniture and vehicles. Life is not very accommodating for them right now. Many are sleeping in tents, campers and/or on their porches and it doesn’t smell good. Have you been to some of those hard hit areas in Pamlico County since the hurricane? Word is that the mosquitoes are so large and populous that they are catching them in crab pots! Again, that is funny to us, but not to them if they are sleeping and living in such horrible accommodations.

I have voluntarily lived in a tent for a short period of time as a child and young adult on backpacking trips through the mountains or at the beach. I have also lived in a dirt floored hut without power in a squatter village in Zimbabwe, as well as a little hut in Chambuta refugee camp, a small cinderblock home for a month at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Zimbabwe, and then a four star hotel in Harare Zimbabwe. After living is such modest and meek accommodations with indigenous people of Zimbabwe for over four weeks I was unable to comfortably stay in the luxury hotel so I checked out and stayed in the Southern Baptist Foreign Mission Board Guest House for $3 per night. I gave the saved money to a local pastor who lived in 10 x 14 foot house with his wife and child. They had an old mattress on the floor and the baby slept in a stroller. That pastor subsequently earned a PhD from University of South Africa and became a professor at the Baptist Theological Seminary of Zimbabwe. He has authored several books. While I was working in the investment business for a decade I experienced corporate trips that enabled me to stay at places like The Lodge at Vail, CO and The Breakers in Palm Beach, FL. As I reflect over which accommodations have had the greatest impact upon my life, they are NOT the Lodge or Breakers, but the places where the Spirit of God enabled me to have communion with people from completely different regions and backgrounds. I have been welcomed lovingly and completely into the homes and lives of people who could have condemned and judged me negatively, but instead accommodated me and allowed me to listen to their story, try to learn something new about God and neighbor, and possibly link to my neighbor in a healthier manner.

I am also musing over the countless men and women who have come to assist the New Bern area through Disaster Relief post Hurricane Irene and how they have used our church for their accommodations. The floors are not soft. The Family Life Center hot water heater only has enough for about eight showers before it is empty and cold! Their days working in our community have been long and hard, just like the floors they sleep on in our church. Nights can be long and hard with so many sleeping in one room. Inevitably one or two individuals snore loudly! However, tought accommodations have not kept them away from God’s call to come and help, to come and love, to come and share the glory of Christ with those who have lost their accommodations to natural disaster.

Rev. 3:20 tells us that Jesus stands at the door of the church and knocks and wants to be invited into our worship services, into our work and witness in the world, into our fellowship and business gatherings. How are we doing at beginning and ending all activities with an invitation for Christ to come in and be at the center of all we are and all we do? Jesus tells us in Matt. 7:7-8, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” Jesus will not come into our church or our lives as individuals unless invited! He does not push or manipulate his way into our hearts. Furthermore, Jesus wants to make accommodations for us that will enable us to be in communion with our Creator, God his Father. He promises us that he will go and prepare a place for us and that he will come again and take us to himself so that where he is we may be also (see John 14:3). We are offered accommodations that cannot be acquired with money or any worldly bartering. What Christ offers is permanent and perfect, after we invite him into our lives. The accommodations of Christ offer a place in the palace, the very presence of God’s glory. It turns dirt floors, hard floors, and mosquito infested yards into places of encounter and faith as we walk with Christ through this world. Jesus doesn’t offer four or five star hotel accommodations, neither do we when we invite him in. But he does offer his own home beyond the stars in a place of light that transfigures and transforms all who come in and share accommodations with Jesus, ours with him and his with us!

Dr. Fitzgerald