That Thing About Hospitality (2)

Can’t say this enough – we’ve lots to learn about hospitality from Uncle Alex & Aunty Dina. As our ‘Singaporean-ised” church friends who just shifted back to Russia, they basically opened up their house and their lives to us and we’re truly grateful.

Honestly, the furthest I can foresee as a host is having overseas friends sleep in my house’s guestroom (if there’s one) or on the couch if they don’t mind. To have them sleep in a common (bed)room with me and my wife….that’s a bit too much. But that’s what Alex and Dina did! It was mind-blowing.

We didn’t expect them to:
- Pick us up at the train station
- Bring us back to their house for the night after they deemed the hostel we booked undesirable.
- Cook healthy and hearty Russian breakfasts, lunches and dinners for us
- Spend a whole morning scanning websites and maps for decent hotels, then calling a whole bunch of them
- Give us a local mobile phone so that we can call them for any emergencies and update them on our whereabouts
- Give us each a stored-value Metro card so that we can zip around the magnificent Moscow subway

In fact, we weren’t so sure how to take all these in. That’s when we started learning some lessons on how to receive. Now Alex and Dina did many more things for us than that, and whenever we thanked them, they reminded us to thank the Lord instead. Aptly so! Indeed, the only way we can repay them and all our other blessings from God is to pay it forward.