WHOM TO INVITE | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 13, 1901

WHOM TO INVITE.

The old minister closed the book, and looked around the village church. “You are told,” he said, “when you make a feast, to call to it not your rich neighbors, but the poor, the maimed, and the blind. Now none of you are going to set out a fine dinner or supper this week. Some of us never in our lives gave a great entertainment. Yet the order is to us. I want each one of you when you go home to consider what God has given you besides food with which to make a feast, and who are the poor folk whom you should bid to it.”

People glanced, smiled at one another, for the good man was full of queer suggestions. But the idea remained in the minds of some of his hearers, making their Sunday afternoon uncomfortable.

It bothered Phil Dorrance, as he sat alone in his room. He usually sat alone, except when at his meals. Phil was the blacksmith’s son, whom his father, by dint of years of hard work and saving, had sent to college. He was grateful to his father, but he felt his education had made a great gulf between him and the old man. His companions were his classmates. He had meant to spend this afternoon with some of them, discussing a paper he had written on the history of the Reformation. Instead, he took it downstairs to the kitchen, where his father and mother in their Sunday clothes sat nodding over the fire. How bare and empty their lives were — work and sleep!

“I want to read you something I have written,” he said, cheerily.

They drew up their chairs, their eyes sparkling with pride and delight, and listened with a keen, shrewd intelligence that surprised him. They were able, too, to correct some mistakes that he had made, and to give him some facts new to him.

“I haven’t had as pleasant a day for years, Phil,” said the old man, when the paper was finished. His aged mother said nothing, but kissed him, her eyes full of tears.

In another farmhouse Grace Peel sat also thinking of the old doctor’s suggestion. She was a musician from the city, who cared only for classical music. At home, her playing gave keen pleasure to friends whose musical taste had been cultivated.

“They are my rich neighbors,” she thought. Rising, she went down to the parlor and opened the piano. “Suppose,” she said, “we sing some hymns — all of us.”

The farmer called in the boys, excitedly. “We haven’t had the piano opened since Nancy went away,” he said. “Come, grandma, I’ll move up your chair. You must join in.”

They sang “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” and “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” Sarah, the black cook, came to the door and threw in a wild note of triumph now and then. The discord sometimes made Grace shiver, but she played on.

Grandma asked for the old hymns she had sung when she was a girl, and the boys for “Hold the Fort.”

When the afternoon was over, the farmer said to Grace, “It’s been a real happy time. You play as well as my daughter Nancy.”

Grandma laid her wrinkled hand on Grace’s shoulder: “The happy hours are so few at my age,” she said. “God bless you for giving me this one, my child.”

So the minister’s suggestion was carried out.

— Selected.