hospitality The of strangers

Karen Ridder is a parishioner at St. James Parish in Liberty and a convert to the Catholic Faith. She graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism and has written for numerous publications in the Kansas City area. Karen and her husband Jeff have three sons and a daughter.

The ratty thing I left behind was a quilt top, or maybe it would have better been described as a pile of artfully sewed together scraps. I had created it with kid clothes I just couldn’t let go of — outgrown items representing something too precious for the donation bin. Mine included the onesie ALL my babies wore home from the hospital; dresses my bestie sent when I had a girl; and the T-shirt my 4-year-old wore nearly every day because it made him feel like a rock star.

They weren’t clothes. They were memories. So, I dragged out my sewing machine to cut, piece and wind these pieces of my motherhood together into a patchwork of those moments. Each colorful bit represented a baby I held; a scraped knee I kissed; a child who asked me to snuggle just a little longer. As I sewed, I watched my youngest run off to kindergarten and realized the cadence of those years with young children had exited my life so slowly it had been hard to notice.

The creation got thrown in a closet as the bustle of life took over. This year, as my oldest was graduating high school, I realized part of moving is completing a task well.

I found a nice lady who knew how to quilt and seemed to understand how precious this silly pile of sewed memories was to me. Her children are already grown. This stranger may have understood better than I why it was important to sew up the rough spots and smooth the edges of this stage of my mothering. I let her. Change is hard at every stage of parenting. We want to hold on tight. God designed a system, however, in which we must let go. Choosing to turn our memories into something beautiful rather than a pile stuck in the back of a closet is a gift to our children and ourselves.

She folded the mishmash of bright colors in on itself; handed me her card; and said she’d see what she could do. I had to walk away, but, suddenly, I felt like I couldn’t breathe. My eyes teared up. I was just a little scared. I barely made it back to my office before I broke down.

Wow. What was wrong with me?

Think of it as a form of hospitality. We are called to offer hospitality to the stranger as if he were Christ Jesus himself. Our children were strangers when they came into our homes, and we offered them hospitality. As they grow towards moving out of our homes, we have to increasingly trust in the hospitality of strangers to help them along.

These strangers are God’s gift of hospitality back to us, smoothing the edges and sewing up the rough spots of our transition. Breaking down at inexplicable moments is still okay. If you accept the hospitality of strangers and walk away a little, they can become part of the patchwork of colors — your parenting masterpiece.