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Amid the cheers of teachers, schoolmates and parents, I crept off by myself to thank God for the warm, understanding people in life who make it possible for my disabled daughter to be like her fellow human beings.
Then I finally cried.
Meg Hill
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The Sound of One Hand Clapping
There's a wonderful story about Jimmy Durante, one of the great entertainers of a few generations ago. He was asked to be a part of a show for World War II veterans. He told them his schedule was very busy and he could afford only a few minutes, but if they wouldn't mind his doing one short monologue and immediately leaving for his next appointment, he would come. Of course, the show's director agreed happily.
But when Jimmy got on stage, something interesting happened. He went through the short monologue and then stayed. The applause grew louder and louder and he kept staying. Pretty soon, he had been on fifteen, twenty, then thirty minutes. Finally, he took a last bow and left the stage. Backstage someone stopped him and said, "I thought you had to go after a few minutes. What happened?"
Jimmy answered, "I did have to go, but I can show you the reason I stayed. You can see for yourself if you'll look at the front row."
In the front row were two men, each of whom had lost an arm in the war. One had lost his right arm and the other had lost his left. Together, they were able to clap, and that's exactly what they were doing, loudly and cheerfully.
Tim Hansel
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The Joy of Usefulness
Some of us are like wheelbarrowsonly useful when pushed, and very easily upset.
Jack Herbert
I became a pastor because I wanted to help people. Why the yearning to help others led to the pastoral ministry and not, say, to a career in medicine is a mystery I've yet to decipher. It's all the better if you can follow your joy and drive a nice car, too. Still, I'm not complaining. I like being a pastor, especially on those rare occasions when I've helped someone along life's way.
I call them rare occasions because the people in my Quaker meeting haven't asked me for much help lately. They're an amazingly self-sufficient group who bear life's burdens with silent equanimity. In addition to their stoic nature, they are incredibly robust. Thus, I am seldom called to help them.
Two of my best friends, Stan and Jim, are also pastors. They spend their days traveling from hospital to hospital comforting one troubled soul after another. At night they collapse in their beds, content with the memory of a
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useful day. I linger near the phone, praying for a call to take me away from my warm home to the bedside of a wretched parishioner. The call seldom comes.
Is it too much for me to expect my people to have problems? If they've asked me to be their pastor, am I wrong to expect them to have an occasional challenge that might occupy my time and help me feel needed?
I don't think this is too much to expect. My friend's congregation was decimated by a pernicious virus. I'm not asking for that. I don't want to be so busy that I'd miss watching The Andy Griffith Show every lunch hour. But if a few persons could see their way clear to contracting a mild disease, that would be considerate. It wouldn't have to be anything exotic. Once a lady in my meeting was afflicted with Bell's palsy. It caused her mouth to droop, and she lost all the feeling on one side of her face. Then, after I spent two glorious days by her bedside, her condition grew better and she was completely healed. It was a wonderful illness! She received much-needed bed rest, and I knew the exquisite joy of helpful ministry.
I know I'm not alone in my desire to feel useful. If a woman spends twelve years learning to be a surgeon, I bet she's anxious to perform her first operation. If a man goes away to technical school and studies car repair, he probably can't wait to crawl underneath a chassis. Doesn't a free country owe its citizens the right to ply their chosen trades? Isn't that what America is all about?
Back when I was growing up, our town had a volunteer fire department. They screeched the fire alarm once a week, and all the firefighters practiced rushing to the station. After a while, they grew discouraged, because real fires were few and far between. One of our more thoughtful citizens, on a beautiful autumn weekend afternoon, set his field ablaze, thereby earning the gratitude of many of our townspeople. Our policeman got to block the nearby
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roads. Our firefighters got to fight a real fire. Our newspaper reporter got to write a story. Our insurance agent got to process a claim for damaged crops. And the minister at the Baptist church got to visit the considerate citizen that very evening and profess thanksgiving that no one was hurt. By day's end, everyone felt the pleasant exhaustion of usefulness and went to bed happy. It was one of our town's finer days.
Keith Miller once said, "Jesus never went out of his way to help anybody." The first time I heard that, it angered me. That's an awful thing to say about Jesus. Then I thought about it for a while and understood what Miller was saying. Jesus never went out of his way to help anybody because helping people was never "out of his way." It was the very reason for his existence.
I've told my wife that when I die I want that chiseled on my gravestone: "Here lies Philip Gulley. He never went out of his way to help anybody." Though, knowing my luck, they'll run out of room and just put: "Here lies Philip Gulley. He never helped anybody."
Which might be closer to the truth, unless my church starts cooperating.
Philip Gulley
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The Writer
I can live for two months on a compliment.
Mark Twain
Nineteenth-century life had dealt the ten-year-old London lad a bad hand. While his father languished in debtors' jail, painful pangs of hunger gnawed at his stomach. To feed himself, the boy took a job pasting labels on blacking bottles in a grim, rat-infested warehouse. He slept in a dismal attic room with two other street urchins, while secretly dreaming of becoming a writer. With only four years of schooling, he had little confidence in his ability. To avoid the jeering laughter he expected, he sneaked out in the dead of night to mail his first manuscript.
Story after story was refused, until finally one was accepted. He wasn't paid for it, but still, one editor had praised his work.
The recognition he received through the printing of that one story changed his life. If it hadn't been for the encouragement of that one editor, he might have spent his entire working life in a rat-infested factory.
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You may have heard of this boy, whose books brought about so many reforms in the treatment of children and the poor: his name was Charles Dickens, author of A Christmas Carol.
Willy McNamara
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Tzippie
One hot summer day, a young couple and their four-year-old daughter, Tzippie, were on their way to the mountains for a few weeks' vacation. Suddenly, a huge truck in the oncoming lane collided head-on with the family's small car. The couple was injured seriously, and little Tzippie sustained many fractures. They were immediately taken to the nearest hospital, where Tzippie was brought to the children's ward and her parents were taken to the intensive care unit. As can well be imagined, Tzippie was not only in great pain, but she was also very frightened because her parents were not nearby to give her comfort.
Martha, the nurse who was assigned to Tzippie, was a single, older woman. She understood Tzippie's fear and insecurity and became very devoted to her. When Martha finished her shift, instead of going home, she would volunteer to stay with Tzippie at night. Of course, Tzippie grew very fond of her and depended on her for her every need. Martha brought her cookies, picture books and toys; she sang songs to her and told her countless stories.
When Tzippie was able to be moved, Martha put her in a wheelchair and took her to visit her parents every day.
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After many months of hospitalization, the family was discharged. Before they left the hospital, the parents b
lessed Martha for her devoted and loving care and invited her to visit them. Tzippie would not let go of Martha, and insisted that she come to live with them. Martha also did not want to be parted from her little Tzippie, but her life was in the children's ward of the hospital, and she could not think of leaving. There was a tearful parting as Tzippie and the loving nurse said good-bye to each other. For a few months the family kept up a close relationship with Marthathrough phone calls only, since they lived quite a distance from her. When they moved abroad, however, they lost contact with each other.
Over thirty years passed. One winter Martha, who was now in her seventies, became seriously ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized in the geriatric ward of a hospital near her home. There was a certain nurse on duty who noticed that Martha had very few visitors. She tried her best to give the elderly lady special care, and she saw that she was a sensitive, clever person.
One night when the nurse was sitting near her elderly patient and they were chatting quietly, she confided in her as to what had prompted her to become a nurse. When she was four years old, she explained, and her parents had been injured in an automobile accident, there had been a wonderful nurse who had brought her back to health with her loving, caring devotion. As she grew older, she determined that one day she, too, would become a nurse and help othersfrom the young to the oldjust as that nurse had done for her.
After she graduated from nursing school overseas, she had met a young man from America, and when they married, they moved to the States. A few months earlier they had moved to this city, where her husband had been offered a very good job, and she was happy to get a
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position as a nurse in this hospital. As the nurse's story unfolded, tears flowed from the elderly patient's eyes, as she realized that this must surely be her little Tzippie, whom she had cared for after the accident.
When the nurse had finished her story, Martha said softly, ''Tzippie, we are together again, but this time you are nursing me!" Tzippie's eyes opened wide as she stared at Martha, suddenly recognizing her. "Is it really you?" she cried out. "How many times I have thought about you and prayed that someday we would meet again!"
When Martha recovered from her illness, Tzippiethis timedid not beg her to come and live with her family. Instead, she just packed up Martha's belongings and took her home with her. She lives with Tzippie to this day, and Tzippie's husband and children have welcomed her like a most special grandmother.
Ruchoma Shain
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Sharing Beauty
Circumstances are like a mattress: When we are on top, we rest in comfort; when we are underneath, we are smothered.
Anonymous
I think it was 1982. I know it was October. A friend had business dealings in the city of Reno, Nevada, and I was asked to accompany her on an overnight trip. While she conducted her business, I was aimlessly wandering down Virginia Street, headed into a most gloriously beautiful sunset. I had an urge to speak to someone on the street to share that beauty, but I couldn't make eye contact with anyone. It seemed everyone was shuffling along looking at their feet.
I took the next-best action. Quickly I ducked into a department store and asked the lady behind the counter if she could come outside for just a minute. She looked at me as though I were from some other planet and said, "Well . . ."
I said, "It will only take a moment." Seemingly against her better judgment, she moved toward the door.
When she got outside I said to her, "Just look at that
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sunset! Nobody out here was looking at it and I just had to share it with someone."
For a few seconds we just looked. Then I said, "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world." I thanked her for coming out to see it; she went back inside and I left. It felt good to share the beauty.
I forgot about the episode.
Four years later my situation had altered considerably. I had come to the end of a twenty-year marriage. I was alone and on my own for the first time in my life and in drastically reduced circumstances. I lived in a trailer park which, at the time, I considered a real come-down, and I had to do my wash in the communal laundry room.
One day, while my clothes were going around, I picked up a Unity Magazine and read an article about a woman who had been in similar circumstances. She had come to the end of a marriage, moved to a strange community, and the only job she could find was one she disliked: cosmetic sales in a department store. We had a lot in common. She was as bummed out as I was.
Then something happened to her that changed everything. She said a woman came into her department store and asked her to step outside to look at a sunset. The stranger had said, "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world," and she had realized the truth in that statement and that she simply had not been seeing it. From that moment on, she turned her life around.
Sherry Maddox
[EDITORS' NOTE: Sherry returned to the laundry room but the magazine was gone. She wrote Unity Magazine, but they were moving when they received her letter and couldn't help. She wants the woman in Reno to know that she has done the same thing for her. The gift has come full circle.]
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Mama's Visit
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
Theodore Roosevelt
In the early morning, I lay snuggled under the quilt my grandmother had made for me. I was small for my seven years, but Granny always told me I was "full of spunk." As I sat up, rubbing sleep from my eyes, I suddenly realized what day it was! Excitement coursed through my entire body. I struggled with the quilt to free my legs. Once free, I bounded out of bed.
"Granny! Granny!" I cried as I ran through the house. My hand reached out to grab the doorjamb that led into the kitchen. I tried to stop but my body swung around the corner with such force that my feet went one way, my arms another and I went sprawling across the kitchen floor.
My grandmother looked up in time to see me fall. A robust woman with salt and pepper hair, Granny had a very stern face, which almost never smiled. From the floor, I saw that she had one hand in the mixing bowl and
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the other floured hand rested on her hip. One of her eyebrows began to rise while the other one stayed perfectly still. I knew when that eyebrow came up, I was about to be in trouble. But I was too excited to care.
"Granny, guess what?" I said. "Know what day this is? Do ya? Do ya know?"
The eyebrow slowly went down and I saw a hint of a smile.
"I reckon I know what day it is," Granny said with amusement in her voice. As she spoke, I scrambled to get up, grabbing hold of Granny's dress to get an extra lift.
Granny shook her head, "Lord child, you will be the death of me." She turned her attention back to the bowl where she continued to knead the dough for biscuits. "Now go on, wash up for breakfast." I knew better than to argue and did what I was told.
When breakfast was on the table, I started eating the biscuits and gravy as fast as I could stuff them into my mouth.
"Victoria," Granny said in a commanding voice. I stopped chewing and looked up at my grandmother, my cheeks stuffed with food.
"Slow down. We do not eat like pigs here!"
I managed to answer, "Yes, Ma'am." When my mouth was finally clear, I said, "But I've gotta get ready, Granny. Mama's coming today!"
Granny looked into my wide blue eyes with an expression I couldn't read and said, "So she said, child. So she said."