As of last evening, we have another son in our home. For the next ten days we are hosting a young man from Guadalahara, Mexico. Esteban will live with us, no doubt observe us, hopefully come to, at least, like us and take this little snapshot of life in America home with him. Not many families would want to be seen as the ‘typical American family’, the family by which the world knows all American families. Our hope is that he has enough experiences going from house to house of other host families so we will be only one of many pictures he takes home with him. Hopefully he will also come to know a little about our life and we, his.

One of the great things(and there are many) about hosting someone from another country in your home, is that you see your world through their ‘fresh eyes’. Your daily routine, which you rarely think about, becomes something you reflect upon. The rooms in your home, where people normally sit to read the paper or do homework, get shifted around as you take another person in to account. And then there is the little subject of snow…ice…snowmen….Christmas lights still up well after Christmas…..why almost all Minnesotans take their shoes off when they come in the door.

Watching this group of young people from Mexico realize right away that a ritual of coming into someone’s home means also creating this mini-shoe shrine made me think back to the my first winter in Minnesota. My Ohio roots never prepared me for taking off shoes as you came into the house….no salt or sand had ever clung to my light weight, year-round shoes. Now, I too enter and remove just like I was born and bred here.

Hopefully our ‘fresh eyes’ will also include learning about how he spends his days at home, what foods he loves and which he’d rather not see on his plate, what he dreams for his future, how he likes to spend his vacations, what his family values. My personal hope is that I may come away with a few words of Spanish that I can actually use in my daily walk. Hardly a day goes by when I don’t think of all those around the world who learn to speak my language and I know almost none of theirs. It throws a mirror up to my humble eyes.

I am reminded of the early Celts who were tribal people. In an effort to ensure that they were not a warring people, families would turn their children over to families of other tribes to live in their homes, be cared for by other adults. It was a preventive measure.It was a way of building bridges between cultures and a way of praying for peace with their very living.

And so last night two other parents that we may never meet entrusted their beloved child to our care. While we slept a bridge was built between our house and a house where the sun is warm and people are wearing their shoes.