Five Minute Friday: Embrace

Kate Motaung hosts another Five Minute Friday at her online home that's a place of embrace for all! FMF is kind of a free write flash mob...


Here's a hug!

But as someone who loves to be (physically) hugged by friends, acquaintance, and often *even* by almost random strangers, I realize all of us need to be sensitive to people's culture, their personal space, and their current preferences. Someone told me going back and forth between Germany and USA several times a year often confuses her; friends and acquaintances on American soil usually enjoy being hugged, whilst in Germany a handshake is the norm, so with the rapid culture shifts all those transatlantic flights invariably cause, she sometimes stands there and waits for the other person to make the first move. I love tight, almost constricting hugs—but ya need to be acquainted well enough with the other person to know if they'll welcome that type of embrace or find it suffocating and rudely inappropriate.

Other forms of embracing an individual or a group don't necessarily mean arms open wide, then enclosing the other, but can be just as physical and tangible. The church I attend is in an ethnically diverse area that includes recent arrivals to this country who amongst them speak only a few dozen languages; after I offered a hug to my blog visitors, the second thing this prompt brought to mind was our embrace of the Persian people who recently have been baptized. We've embraced them by giving them scriptures in their native Farsi language; in a burst of inspiration, our office administrator started arranging a circle of chairs outside with a wide canopy shelter for our Persian brothers and sisters to visit and converse with each other during our weekly post-liturgy brunch. We call it the "Persian Patio," and that's one of our ways of offering what has become a welcoming and a most welcome hug!