Come with me to a
third grade classroom....
There is a
nine-year-old kid 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.
