Hospitality While gathered at the Place of Grace our class had a difficult time agreeing on an exact definition of hospitality. The dictionary states that hospitality is “the friendly and generous reception and entertainment of guests, visitors, and strangers.” I agree with this but I believe there is more to it than just that. Hospitality is much deeper than just being kind to someone. It involves giving someone a place to go when they have nowhere else, helping others with the things you are lucky enough to have, and also helping them to feel comfortable and safe in their surroundings. I was introduced to being hospitable at a very young age. My first impacting experience with hospitality came from my grandma. She worked for a company that provided housing and care for mentally handicap people in our town. My grandma though of these people as more than just her clients, she treated them as if they were her children. Many of them did not have family in the area so they often didn’t have a place to go for the holidays. For this reason, my grandma often brought many of them to our family holidays, such as Thanksgiving and Christmas. After a while it seemed as if they were just a part of the family. I had friends ask me why I had these people at my house, but I had gotten so used to them being there that it would not have felt the same without them there with us. These visits didn’t just stop with family gatherings. My grandma would often bring her clients to her house, so they would almost always be there when I went to visit her. Although I was younger, about seven at the time, I learned to communicate with them on their own level and found myself looking forward to spending more time with them. Thinking back I can vividly remember many of my friends making fun of people with mental disorders, as many people still do today. I am grateful that I was able to learn just how normal people who are ‘different’ really are at such a young age. My grandma opened my eyes up to the importance of opening my doors for others and treating everyone as equals. There is more to hospitality than just giving people a place to go when they don’t have anywhere else. Another big factor of hospitality is putting the needs of others before yours. Of course I don’t mean to starve yourself and put yourself in danger by trying to save someone else. I mean that sometimes there are people who are in such desperate need that what you have, such as a nice place to stay and three full meals a day, can be put on hold for a while. When I was in Kentucky on a mission trip my crew and I did exactly that. We quit eating three big meals a day, simply because we had no time to eat. We also learned to function without our desired eight hours of sleep, and we spend the majority of our day working outside in the blazing heat when all of us would have much rather been sitting in the air conditioning we are used to. This sounds rough when I say it like this, but while I was in Kentucky none of this mattered to me. When I laid down to go to sleep at night I didn’t think about how I had to get up in 5 hours