Use every chance

"Whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone."

"Use every chance you have for doing good."

"Whenever you possibly can, do god to those who need it.
Never tell your neighbor to wait until tomorrow if you can help them now."

The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time.
The best time to love is now.

They Call Him the Savior

Longing to leave her poor Brazilian neighborhood, Christina wanted to see the world. Discontent with a home having only a pallet on the floor, a washbasin, and a wood-burning stove, she dreamed of a better life in the city.

One morning she slipped away, breaking her mother's heart. Knowing what life on the streets would be like for her young, attractive daughter, Maria hurriedly packed to go find her. On her way to the bus stop she entered a drugstore to get one last thing. Pictures.

She sat in the photograph booth, closed the curtain, and spent all she could on pictures of herself. With her purse full of small black-and-white photos, she boarded the next bus to Rio de Janiero.

Maria knew Christina had no way of earning money. She also knew that her daughter was too stubborn to give up. When pride meets hunger, a human will do things that were before unthinkable. Knowing this, Maria began her search. Bars, hotels, nightclubs, any place with the reputation for street walkers or prostitutes.

She went to them all. And at each place she left her picture,taped on a bathroom mirror, tacked to a hotel bulletin board, fastened to a corner phone booth. And on the back of each photo she wrote a note.

It wasn't too long before both the money and the pictures ran out, and Maria had to go home. The weary mother wept as the bus began its long journey back to her small village. It was a few weeks later that young Christina descended the hotel stairs.

Her young face was tired. Her brown eyes no longer danced with youth but spoke of pain and fear. Her laughter was broken. Her dream had become a nightmare. A thousand times over she had longed to trade these countless beds for her secure pallet.

Yet the little village was, in too many ways, too far away. As she reached the bottom of the stairs, her eyes noticed a familiar face. She looked again, and there on the lobby mirror was a small picture of her mother.

Christina's eyes burned and her throat tightened as she walked across the room and removed the small photo. Written on the back was this compelling invitation. 'Whatever you have done, whatever you have become, it doesn't matter. Please come home." She did.

Max Lucado, No Wonder They Call Him the Savior, Multnomah Press, 1986, pp. 158-9

April Fools

One of the most elaborate hoaxes in broadcast history was an April Fool's joke played on the British Broadcasting Corporation's current affairs program Panorama, with its rather dignified host Richard Dimbleby earnestly relating a story about the annual spaghetti harvest filmed in a Swiss-Italian spaghetti orchard.

Cameraman Charles de Jaeger thought up the spoof and related to Denis Norden how it was accomplished.

'Panorama's first famous spaghetti harvest came from my school days in Austria," de Jaeger said, 'when a master was always saying to us, 'You're so stupid you'd think spaghetti grew on trees.'

So it had always been in my mind to do the story and I tried for several years. It was not until I was working on Panorama that I got the go-ahead.

'I went to the Swiss Tourist Office, who said they would help, and I flew to Lugano. It was in March when I thought the weather would be sunny with flowers out. There was a mist over the whole area.

The tourist office guy took me around all over the place; not one blossom out, no leaves out. It was now Tuesday and I could not find anything and said in desperation, 'What can be done?'

'Then we found this hotel in Castiglione, which had laurel trees with leaves on, tall trees. So I said, 'We'll do it here. Let's go down into Lugano and get some handmade spaghetti.'

'We did that, put the strands of spaghetti in a big wooden platter, took that in the car and we drove back. By the time we got there, the damn things wouldn't hang up. They'd dried out.

So we cooked them, tried to put them on the trees, and this time they fell off because they were so slippery.

'Then this tourist guy had a brilliant idea,put the spaghetti between damp cloths. That worked and we got local girls to hang them up,about ten pounds' worth.

Then we got the girls into national costume and filmed them climbing on ladders with these baskets, filling them up, and laying them out in the sun.

And we said in the script, with a guitar playing in the background, 'We have this marvelous festival. The first harvest of the spaghetti.'

'At the end of the three-minute film Richard Dimbleby said, 'Now we say goodnight to this first day of April.'

In spite of that hint, next morning it was surprising the number of people who didn't recognize that the spaghetti harvest was a hoax."

Peter Hay, Canned Laughter, Oxford University Press, Bits & Pieces, March 30, 1995, pp. 19-21

Fruit of the Spirit

Joy

Love in Jubilation

Peace

Love in Repose

Longsuffering

Love on Trial

Gentleness

Love in Society

Goodness

Love in Action

Faith

Love in Endurance

Meekness

Love at School

Temperance

Love in Discipline

Galatians 5:22-23

Corrie Ten Boom

Corrie Ten Boom told of not being able to forget a wrong that had been done to her.

She had forgiven the person, but she kept rehashing the incident and so couldn't sleep. Finally Corrie cried out to God for help in putting the problem to rest.

'His help came in the form of a kindly Lutheran pastor," Corrie wrote, 'to whom I confessed my failure after two sleepless weeks." 'Up in the church tower," he said, nodding out the window, 'is a bell which is rung by pulling on a rope. But you know what?

After the sexton lets go of the rope, the bell keeps on swinging. First ding, then dong. Slower and slower until there's a final dong and it stops. I believe the same thing is true of forgiveness. When we forgive, we take our hand off the rope.

But if we've been tugging at our grievances for a long time, we mustn't be surprised if the old angry thoughts keep coming for a while. They're just the ding-dongs of the old bell slowing down."

'And so it proved to be. There were a few more midnight reverberations, a couple of dings when the subject came up in my conversations, but the force,which was my willingness in the matter,had gone out of them.

They came less and less often and at the last stopped altogether: we can trust God not only above our emotions, but also above our thoughts."

Source unknown

Things To Do

There are at least four things you can do with your hands.
You can wring them in despair;
You can fold them in idleness;
You can clench them in anger;
Or you can use them to help someone.

Bits & Pieces, January 5, 1995, p. 24

Little Stuff

Success is often reached through the little stuff. When Pat Riley coached the Los Angeles Lakers from 1982 to 1990, the team won four NBA championships.

In taking over the New York in 1991, Riley inherited a team with a losing record. But the Knicks seemed able to play above their abilities and even gave the eventual champions, the Chicago Bulls, their hardest competition in the play-offs last May.

How does Riley do it? He says his talent lies in attention to detail. For example, every NBA team studies videotapes and compiles statistics to evaluate players' game performances.

But Riley's use of these tools is more comprehensive than that of his rivals. 'We measure areas of performance that are often ignored: jumping in pursuit of every rebound even if you don't get it, swatting at every pass, diving for loose balls, letting someone smash into you in order to draw a foul."

After each game, these 'effort" statistics are punched into a computer. 'Effort," Riley explains, 'is what ultimately separates journeyman players from impact players.

Knowing how well a player executes all these little things is the key to unlocking career-best performances."

Little Things Do Mean a Lot by Robert McGarvey, Reader's Digest