Random Acts of Hospitality...

Today ended up being one of my most favorite days since being here in Chicago. This morning with were given the instructions to spend the day being hospitable around the city. Those were our only guidelines to follow. Bethany and I had a few ideas on how we wanted to spend the day, but we also knew that we wanted to be random. To start the morning we went down and walked the "Magnificent Mile" starting at the bean. There we found people who were struggling to take pictures of themselves and offered to take a picture for them with their loved ones. This also is a great conversation starter and proved to be AWESOMELY fun...:) One of the couples there was so excited and said that they had been in Chicago for 3 days and hadn't taken a picture with the 2 of them in it yet. Apparently we looked trustworthy enough for people to let us hold their property because I did get to use some extremely high dollar equipment. After a while we left because it was obvious that some of the people we were taking pictures of were noticing us walking around taking pictures of other people. Kinda wierd...

After we left there we walked around downtown some more being very conscience about doing every hospitable thing we could do whether it was a big or little thing. From opening doors, to giving our seats up on the bus, to picking a little girls bike up after she had fallen on the street. I feel that during a normal day, many of these were things that I would do anyways, but this day we were thinking about it. We found ourselves in Borders ( book store) with the mission to read to little kids, but unfortunately the kids didn't come. Our other idea was to find a flower shop and get some daisies or something and hand them out on the street, but since it was Labor Day, all the shops were closed! We still want to do that on another day.

That evening, Leigh really wanted to invite someone to dinner with her at McDonald's and she asked me if I wanted to go. I am so glad that I sad yes because that McDonald's experience will always be one of my favorites. I had just come from that way, so I had told Leigh that there was a women who we could ask in front of one of the churches. But at the end of the alley we saw a man and he smiled at us. We both just couldn't walk away from this man. That could have been Jesus sitting there... We asked him what he was doing later that night and he said that he was free, so we invited him to join us. We both found it a little odd when he popped into a convenience store for a second as we walked across the street to the McDonald's. After some deliberation "Terran" decided that he really wanted the classic Big Mac; that was his favorite:) 

We got our meals and were settling in and Terran mentioned that he had a fiance' and that she was sitting "in their spot" where we had found him. She had been the one who he had told he was going to McDonald's to in the convenience store. I practically yelled, "Well, GO GET HER!" He gave us a sheepish grin and went across the street to explain the situation.That was when we met Candy...

Later we found out that when Terran went to get her he told her that he had met some ladies, and she replied," WHAT?! Where are you going with this?" We laughed about this later. They were a HOOT! We didn't know how the conversation would go, whether or not these two people that we had just met would open up to us about anything in their lives or not. Honestly speaking, the conversation went really well. Terran (friends call him T.J.)  and Candy are 23 and 20 years old and have been engaged for a while now and they have 3 kids. Unfortunately their kids are in Kansas with Candy's sister because at the moment they are not able to care for them under their current situation. We got to see pictures and it was apparent that they love them and miss them very much. Terran was the first person that I have met who struggles with multiple personality disorder. Brandon Young comes out in aggressive times, and Tony Williams comes out during "business time". (Flight of the Conchords reference-look it up!)  We talked about so many things: church, flowers, jobs, school, careers, family, and other random things. Though they are down on their luck at the moment they were so nice and were telling us where we could get food and what shelters were available at what times. We were showing hospitality to them, but they were definitely showing it back to us. I think that was the most powerful thing about the whole evening was that they didn't ask for anything, they didn't expect anything from us, but we could sit down and have a "nice" meal with them.