1964 Awake! - Theocratic Collector.com

THE ART OF BEING
o BE a good guest is an art. It is a
T skill that involves both mind and heart.
What kjnd of guest are you? When you
take your leave, is your host sorry to see
you go?
Of course, if you are to be a guest you
should want to be a good one. It has been
said that what makes a good guest is personality,
manners and delicacy of feeling.
Such may be true, but more basic and
more likely to be jn the reael] of all is the
requirement of empathy, that is, the ability
to put yourself in the shoes of another,
of your host or hostess in this instance. In
other words, it means letting yourself be
guided by the rule Jesus gave: "Just as
you want men to do to you, do the same
way to them."-Luke 6: 31.
To be a good guest you must, in the first
place, know whether to accept a certain
invitation or not. Some in.ltations it may
not be wise to accept: "Do .1Ot feed yourself
with the food of anyone of ungenerous
eye, nor show yourself craving his tasty
dishes. For as one that has calculated within
his soul, so he is. 'Eat and drink,' he
says to you, but his heart itself is not with
you. Your morsel that you have eaten, you
will vomit it out, and you will have wasted
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your pleasant words," your compliments
for his hospitalitY.-Prov. 23:6-8.
Even where the invitation is such that
you would like to accept it, it often is well
to express a measure of reluctance, or at
least not too great a readiness to accept
the invitation, In this way the sincerity
and strength of the invitation can be made
to appear, Thus, in the instance of Jesus
and his two disciples on the way to Emmaus
on the morning of his resurrection,
we read that "he made as if he was journeying
on farther." This caused them to
use "pressure upon him, saying: 'Stay
with us, because it is toward evening and
the day has already declined.' " The same
tactic is implied in regard to an inVitation
that Paul and his associates received to
be the guests of Lydia, a recent convert to
Christianity, for Luke tells us that "she
just made us come."-Luke 24:28, 29; Acts
16:15.
However, should the would-be host be a
diffident person or one of humble circumstances,
any undue reluctance on yOur part
mjght discourage him and so jt would be
better to answer such a one with an expansive,
"Why, I'd be glad to come!" In
fact. under certain circumstances it may
AWAKEl