Practice What You Preach

I want to share with you what happend last night...I had one of those moments where I had to make an effort to practice what I preached, and this from my message just from Sunday...Oh how quickly I forgot.

Rhonda and I have been trying to get rid of our dog, Otis, for about a couple of months so Rhonda finally put an ad in "craigslist". If you don't know what it is I would suggest checking it out. Anyway, She posted the dog first on "PetFinder", but we just got some crazy people responding and a lot of spam/junk email. So, Rhonda's mom suggested posting on "craigslist", we did and we started getting good responses right away.

Anyway, not to drag out a boring story longer than it has to...Rhonda had called one of the responses that we had gotten that were very interested in Otis to set-up a time to come over an look a him. This was about 9:30pm last night. I told Rhonda that it was cool, but I was just going to stay in the bedroom and not come out to the living room to meet or talk with them.

Then I heard that voice which often comes at times like this...it said, "Jason, were you at church Sunday? I heard a really good sermon about being hospitable to those around us." As I rolled my eyes the voice continued, "You should have been there." My response was, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." Feeling extremely guilty from my comment I quickly changed my mind about the whole thing. When they arrived I came out to greet them, and we had a truly awesome time visiting and talking. We didn't just talk about the dog either, we asked them where they worked, where they were from, we also were able to share about where we go to church, and in all we just had a great time visiting.

They must have been comfortable too, because I looked at the clock when they left and it was 11:00pm. Before I went to bed I thought, "That is the meaning of being hospitable to those we come in contact with on a daily basis."

I wanted to post this story because it was funny that Rhonda called me out using my own sermon, but also to show that I don't have it all figured out (for most of you I don't even need to say that, because you know that already...I just want to be clear with everyone). I am still learning how to take the messages that I hear (and give) and apply them to my life. I am so glad that I don't have to pretend to be perfect, that I can share my faults and failures in an effort to be authentic, and to encourage others to be authentic as well.

Sharing my authenticity through my failures.