Given to Hospitality
By GARY TOOLE
We all get carried away when a big outfit like the Hilton Hotel chain starts using the word hospitality in its advertisement promotions. Some folks act like the Hilton company invented hospitality. Wrong! It's been in the Bible for thousands of years. In Romans 12:13, it says that we are to be given to hospitality.

When we came to Toombs County in 1952, these folks definedthe word "hospitality." They were so hospitable that my dad started calling "God's Country." This reminds me that an old fellow went up north and saw a gold phone and it had a sign on it that read "Call God. $100.00. He thought that kind of expensive. So he came on back down south to Georgia and saw the exact same phone and read "Call God. 25 cents." The fel- low asked the storekeeper why the call was so cheap and he said, "Sir! Here it's a local call. This is God's

country."

The Word teaches us that we should entertain strangers because we might be entertaining angels unaware. That's anothe r one that the devil

has tried to rob

us of, with bars up to the windows, and our guns loaded.

When we came to Toombs County in 1952, this area was not like it is today. One nut tried to convince me that things were no worse now than they were 100 years ago. I wondered what part of Disney World he has been living in. As the first line of Charles Dickens' book, A Tale of Two Cities, says, "We are living in the best of times (materially) and the worst of times (morally.")

Back to angels unaware. Years ago my grandfather and my parents would take in transients (tramps back then) and would feed them and let them sleep in the shed room for the night. My parents fed a man once and he disappeared from their sight. They know now that he was not only a stranger but as the Word said, "an angel."

Don't get me wrong because we are to protect ourselves, but Christians are to conduct themselves differently from the rest of the world. We as Christians are supposed to work things out, not throw them in prison.

I am reminded of the story of a grandpa and grandson going down to the corn crib and they caught a man stealing corn and so the grandson waits for grandpa to nab the man and give him a thrashing of a lifetime. Instead, the old gentleman tells the fellow, "Now if you didn't get enough, then come back tomorrow and get some more."

The man fledand months later got under conviction and the old grandpa helped pray him to victory. That's a tough, yet good, one.

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