Come
with me to a
third grade classroom ...
There is a eight-year-old boy sitting at his desk
and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his
feet and the front of his pants are wet.
He thinks his heart is going to stop
because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened. It's
never
happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never
hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they'll never speak
to him
again as long as he lives.
The boy believes his heart is going to stop, he
puts his head down and prays this prayer, "Dear God, this is
an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes
from now I'm dead meat."
He looks up from his prayer and here comes the
teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been
discovered.
As the teacher is walking toward him, a
classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with
water. Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps
the bowl of water in the boy's lap. The boy pretends to be angry,
but
all the while is saying to himself, "Thank you, Lord! Thank you,
Lord!"
Now all of a sudden, instead of being the
object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The
teacher
rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his
pants dry out.
All the other children are on their hands and
knees cleaning up around his desk.
The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the
ridicule that
should
have been his has been transferred to someone else - Susie. She
tries to help, but they tell her to get out. "You've done enough,
you
klutz!"
Finally, at the end of the day, as they are
waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and
whispers, "You did that on purpose, didn't you?" Susie whispers
back,
"I wet my pants once, too."
May God help us see the opportunities that are
always around us to do good.
Contributed
by
Karin
Tymn
