Seize the Moment

Here's another great story I received recently that was definitely worth sharing.....Come with me to a third grade classroom. There is a nine-year-old boy sitting at his desk. 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 other boys find out, he will never hear the end of it. And 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 there comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered. As the teacher is walking towards 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, he 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 of the way, saying, "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 we all see the opportunities that are always around us to do good and teach our children to do the same.

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