She had been shopping with her Mom in Wal-Mart.She must have been 6 years old, this beautiful red-haired, freckle faced image of innocence. It was pouring outside. The kind of rain that gushes over the topof rain gutters, so much in a hurry to hit the earth it has no time to flow down the spout. We all stood there under the awning and just inside the door of the Wal-Mart. We waited, some patiently, others irritated because nature messed up their hurried day.



I am always mesmerized by rainfall. I got lost in the sound and sight of the heavens washing away the dirt and dust of the world. Memories of running, splashing so carefree as a child come pouring in as a welcome reprieve from the worries of my day.

Her voice was so sweet as it broke the hypnotic trance we were all caught in. "Mom, let's run through the rain," she said.

"What?" Mom asked.

"Let's run through the rain!" She repeated.


"No, honey. We'll wait until it slows down a bit," Mom replied.

This young child waited about another minute and repeated: "Mom, let's run through the rain."

"We'll get soaked if we do," Mom said.

"No, we won't, Mom. That's not what you said this morning," the young girl said as she tugged at her Mom's arm.

"This morning? When did I say we could run through the rain and not get wet?

"Don't you remember? When you were talking to Daddy about his cancer, you said, If God can get us through this, he can get us through anything!"

The entire crowd stopped dead silent. I swear you couldn't hear anything but the rain. We all stood silently. No one came or left in the next few minutes. Mom paused and thought for a moment about what she would say. Now some would laugh it off and scold her for being silly. Some might even ignore what was said. But this was a moment of affirmation in a young child's life. A time when innocent trust can be nurtured so that it will bloom into faith.

"Honey, you are absolutely right. Let's run through the rain. If GOD lets us get wet, well maybe we just needed washing," Mom said.

Then off they ran. We all stood watching, smiling and laughing as they darted past the cars and yes, through the puddles. They held their shopping bags over their heads just in case. They got soaked. But they were followed by a few who screamed and laughed like children all the way to their cars. And yes, I did. I ran. I got wet. I needed washing.



Circumstances or people can take away your material possessions, they can take away your money, and they can take away your health. But no one can ever take away your precious memories... So, don't forget to make time and take the opportunities to make memories everyday.To everything there is a season and a time to every purpose under heaven.

A long time ago, there was a huge apple tree. A little boy loved to come and play around it everyday. He climbed to the treetop, ate the apples, took a nap under the shadow...he loved the tree and the tree loved to play with him. Time went by...the little boy had grown up and he no longer played around the tree every day.


One day, the boy came back to the tree and he looked sad. "Come and play with me" the tree asked the boy. "I am no longer a kid, I do not play around trees any more" the boy replied.

"I want toys. I need money to buy them." "Sorry, but I do not have money... but you can pick all my apples and sell them. So, you will have money." The boy was so excited. He grabbed all the apples on the tree and left happily. The boy never came back after he picked the apples. The tree was sad.

One day, the boy who now turned into a man returned and the tree was excited "Come and play with me" the tree said. "I do not have time to play. I have to work for my family. We need a house for shelter. Can you help me?" "Sorry, but I do not have any house. But you can chop off my branches to build your house." So the man cut all the branches of the tree and left happily. The tree was glad to see him happy but the man never came back since then. The tree was again lonely and sad.

One hot summer day, the man returned and the tree was delighted. "Come and play with me!" the tree said. "I am getting old. I want to go sailing to relax myself. Can you give me a boat?" said the man. "Use my trunk to build your boat. You can sail far away and be happy." So the man cut the tree trunk to make a boat. He went sailing and never showed up for a long time.

Finally, the man returned after many years. "Sorry, my boy. But I do not have anything for you anymore. No more apples for you ..." the tree said. "No problem, I do not have any teeth to bite" the man replied. "No more trunk for you to climb on" "I am too old for that now" the man said. "I really cannot give you anything... the only thing left is my dying roots" the tree said with tears. "I do not need much now, just a place to rest. I am tired after all these years" the man replied. "Good! Old tree roots are the best place to lean on and rest, Come, come sit down with me and rest." The man sat down and the tree was glad and smiled with tears...

This is a story of everyone.
The tree is like our parents

When we were young, we loved to play with our Mum and Dad...

When we grow up, we leave them...only come to them when we need something or when we are in trouble.

No matter what, parents will always be there and
give everything they could
just to make you happy.


You may think the boy is cruel to the tree, but that is how we treat our parents.
We take them 4 granted we don't appreciate all they do 4 us, UNTIL it's 2 late.

Please enlighten all your friends and your families by telling them this story,

Love your Parents



___________________________________________

A few months before I was born, my dad met a stranger who was new to our small town. From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with
this enchanting newcomer, and soon invited him to live with our
family.

The stranger was quickly accepted and was around to welcome me
into the world a few months later. As I grew up, I never
questioned his place in our family. Mom taught me to love the
Word of God, and Dad taught me to obey it. But the stranger was
our storyteller.

He could weave the most fascinating tales. Adventures,
mysteries, and comedies were daily conversations. He could hold
our whole family spellbound for hours each evening. He was like
a friend to the whole family. He took Dad, my brother, and me to
our first majorleague baseball game. He was always encouraging us
to see the movies and he even made arrangements to introduce us
to several movie stars. The stranger was an incessant talker. Dad
didn't seem to mind, but sometimes Mom would quietly get up -
while the rest of us were enthralled with one of his stories of
faraway places- go to her room, read her Bible, and pray. I
wonder now if she ever prayed that the stranger would leave.

You see, my Dad ruled our household with certain moral
convictions. But this stranger never felt an obligation to honor
them. Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our house - not
from us, from our friends, or from adults. Our longtime visitor,
however, used occasional four letter words that burned my ears
and made Dad squirm.

To my knowledge the stranger was never confronted. My Dad was a
teetotaler who didn't permit alcohol in his home - not even for
cooking. But the stranger felt like we needed exposure and
enlightened us to other ways of life. He offered us beer and
other alcoholic beverages often. He made cigarettes look
tasty,cigars manly, and pipes distinguished. He talked freely
about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant, sometimes
suggestive, and generally embarrassing. I know now that my early
concepts of the man/woman relationship were influenced by the
stranger.

As I look back, I believe it was the grace of God that the
stranger did not influence us more. Time after time, he opposed
the values of my parents, yet he was seldom rebuked and never
asked to leave.

More than thirty years have passed since the stranger moved in
with us, but if I were to walk into my parent's home today, I
would still see him sitting there waiting for someone to listen
to his stories and watch him draw his pictures.
His name?..................



We always just called him..................TV.

Emily and I met in our first semester of college and dated for almost six years. Regardless of how crafty and intuitive my ideas, I was never able to surprise her with anything. Emily was investigative and I was naive - not a good combination for a surprise. Leave it to me to accidentally leave behind a receipt or just happen to be checking voicemail on a speakerphone when the restaurant or florist would call to confirm.

Time after time, I tried to surprise her. Time after time, I failed.

When I began to think about a long-overdue proposal, I wanted nothing more than to surprise her. So I embarked upon a personal journey to find a unique and special way to pop the question.

After much thought - and some interesting suggestions from friends and coworkers - I decided to incorporate two of Emily's loves: reading (her graduate-school pursuit) and pigs (her favorite animal since childhood) into a storybook proposal. My dream was to create and publish a children's book in which two little pigs, Emmy and Matty, would parallel the story of Emily and me.

I was working in public relations for a school district. I asked an art teacher if she knew any students skilled in cartoon illustration. Without hesitation she put me in touch with Jeremy, a tenth-grader who excitedly showed me his portfolio. I hired him on the spot. Page by page, I sent the manuscript to Jeremy for custom drawings. And I began to write.

I wrote about two little pigs that meet in a college computer lab, just like Emily and I. My story detailed Emmy and Matty's journey through the years. On page eight, the two little pigs find themselves in front of a sunset.

"One fall evening, Matty had an important question for Emmy," the page read. The proposal page followed.

Upon completion of the illustrations, text and layout of the story, my creation was ready to be printed. It came back in the form of a real book, hardbound. I had done it. I successfully produced the entire book in complete secrecy. After all these years, I would surprise Emily.

On a random Thursday, I told Emily I had found a couple of cute children's books on sale for her collection. Naturally she wanted to take a look, so the first one I gave her was The Story of the Two Little Pigs.

As she read the first couple of pages, she started to catch on that I had written a book for her, but had no I idea it would change both of our lives forever.

As she approached the proposal page, I asked her to stand up. I bent down on one knee as I watched her eyes follow the words on the paper that simply said, "Emily Suzanne . . . Will You Marry Me?" She was speechless as she looked up and saw me with a ring in my hand.

Stunned, she closed the book and gave me a big hug. "Yes, yes and yes! Of course. I love you!"

We hugged for a couple of minutes and I wiped the tears from her eyes. I urged her to turn to the last page of her storybook proposal - an illustration of pigs dressed in wedding gown and tuxedo.

It read, in appropriate storybook fashion: "Emmy and Matty lived happily ever after."

One afternoon I toured an art museum while waiting for my husband to finish a business meeting. I was looking forward to a quiet view of the masterpieces.

A young couple viewing the paintings ahead of me chattered nonstop between themselves. I watched them a moment and decided she was doing all the talking. I admired his patience for putting up with her constant parade of words. Distracted by their noise, I moved on.

I encountered them several times as I moved through the various rooms of art. Each time I heard her constant gush of words, I moved away quickly.

I was standing at the counter of the museum gift shop making a purchase when the couple approached the exit. Before they left, the man reached into his pocket and pulled out a white object. He extended it into a long cane and then tapped his way into the coatroom to get his wife's jacket.

"He's a brave man," the clerk at the counter said. "Most of us would give up if we were blinded at such a young age. During his recovery, he made a vow his life wouldn't change. So, as before, he and his wife come in whenever there's a new art show."

"But what does he get out of the art?" I asked. "He can't see."

"Can't see! You're wrong. He sees a lot. More than you or I do," the clerk said. "His wife describes each painting so he can see it in his head."

I learned something about patience, courage and love that day. I saw the patience of a young wife describing paintings to a person without sight and the courage of a husband who would not allow blindness to alter his life. And I saw the love shared by two people as I watched this couple walk away with their arms intertwined.

It was like many Maui mornings, the sun rising over Haleakala as we greeted our divers for the day's charter. As my captain and I explained the dive procedures, I noticed the wind line moving into Molokini, a small, crescent-shaped island that harbors a large reef. I slid through the briefing, then prompted my divers to gear up, careful to do everything right so the divers would feel confident with me, the dive leader.

The dive went pretty close to how I had described it: The garden eels performed their underwater ballet, the parrot fish grazed on the coral, and the ever-elusive male flame wrasse flared their colors to defend their territory. Near the last level of the dive, two couples in my group signaled they were going to ascend. As luck would have it, the remaining divers were two European brothers, who were obviously troubled by the idea of a "woman" dive master and had ignored me for the entire dive.

The three of us caught the current and drifted along the outside of the reef, slowly beginning our ascent until, far below, something caught my eye. After a few moments, I made out the white shoulder patches of a manta ray in about one hundred and twenty feet of water.

Manta rays are one of my greatest loves, but very little is known about them. They feed on plankton, which makes them more delicate than an aquarium can handle. They travel the oceans and are therefore a mystery.

Mantas can be identified by the distinctive pattern on their belly, with no two rays alike. In 1992, I had been identifying the manta rays that were seen at Molokini and found that some were known, but many more were sighted only once, and then gone.

So there I was: a beautiful, very large ray beneath me and my skeptical divers behind. I reminded myself that I was still trying to win their confidence, and a bounce to see this manta wouldn't help my case. So I started calling through my regulator, "Hey, come up and see me!" I had tried this before to attract the attention of whales and dolphins, who are very chatty underwater and will come sometimes just to see what the noise is about. My divers were just as puzzled by my actions, but continued to try to ignore me.

There was another dive group ahead of us. The leader, who was a friend of mine and knew me to be fairly sane, stopped to see what I was doing. I kept calling to the ray, and when she shifted in the water column, I took that as a sign that she was curious. So I started waving my arms, calling her up to me.

After a minute, she lifted away from where she had been riding the current and began to make a wide circular glide until she was closer to me. I kept watching as she slowly moved back and forth, rising higher, until she was directly beneath the two Europeans and me. I looked at them and was pleased to see them smiling. Now they liked me. After all, I could call up a manta ray!

Looking back to the ray, I realized she was much bigger than what we were used to around Molokini - a good fifteen feet from wing tip to wing tip, and not a familiar-looking ray. I had not seen this animal before. There was something else odd about her. I just couldn't figure out what it was.

Once my brain clicked in and I was able to concentrate, I saw deep V-shaped marks of her flesh missing from her backside. Other marks ran up and down her body. At first I thought a boat had hit her. As she came closer, now with only ten feet separating us, I realized what was wrong.

She had fishing hooks embedded in her head by her eye, with very thick fishing line running to her tail. She had rolled with the line and was wrapped head to tail about five or six times. The line had torn into her body at the back, and those were the V-shaped chunks that were missing.

I felt sick and, for a moment, paralyzed. I knew wild animals in pain would never tolerate a human to inflict more pain. But I had to do something.

Forgetting about my air, my divers and where I was, I went to the manta. I moved very slowly and talked to her the whole time, like she was one of the horses I had grown up with. When I touched her, her whole body quivered, like my horse would. I put both of my hands on her, then my entire body, talking to her the whole time. I knew that she could knock me off at any time with one flick of her great wing.

When she had steadied, I took out the knife that I carry on my inflator hose and lifted one of the lines. It was tight and difficult to get my finger under, almost like a guitar string. She shook, which told me to be gentle. It was obvious that the slightest pressure was painful.

As I cut through the first line, it pulled into her wounds. With one beat of her mighty wings, she dumped me and bolted away. I figured that she was gone and was amazed when she turned and came right back to me, gliding under my body. I went to work. She seemed to know it would hurt, and somehow, she also knew that I could help. Imagine the intelligence of that creature, to come for help and to trust!

I cut through one line and into the next until she had all she could take of me and would move away, only to return in a moment or two. I never chased her. I would never chase any animal. I never grabbed her. I allowed her to be in charge, and she always came back.

When all the lines were cut on top, on her next pass, I went under her to pull the lines through the wounds at the back of her body. The tissue had started to grow around them, and they were difficult to get loose. I held myself against her body, with my hand on her lower jaw. She held as motionless as she could. When it was all loose, I let her go and watched her swim in a circle. She could have gone then, and it would have all fallen away. She came back, and I went back on top of her.

The fishing hooks were still in her. One was barely hanging on, which I removed easily. The other was buried by her eye at least two inches past the barb. Carefully, I began to take it out, hoping I wasn't damaging anything. She did open and close her eye while I worked on her, and finally, it was out. I held the hooks in one hand, while I gathered the fishing line in the other hand, my weight on the manta.

I could have stayed there forever! I was totally oblivious to everything but that moment. I loved this manta. I was so moved that she would allow me to do this to her. But reality came screaming down on me. With my air running out, I reluctantly came to my senses and pushed myself away.

At first, she stayed below me. And then, when she realized that she was free, she came to life like I never would have imagined she could. I thought she was sick and weak, since her mouth had been tied closed, and she hadn't been able to feed for however long the lines had been on her. I thought wrong! With two beats of those powerful wings, she rocketed along the wall of Molokini and then directly out to sea! I lost view of her and, remembering my divers, turned to look for them.

Remarkably, we hadn't traveled very far. My divers were right above me and had witnessed the whole event, thankfully! No one would have believed me alone. It seemed too amazing to have really happened. But as I looked at the hooks and line in my hands and felt the torn calluses from her rough skin, I knew that, yes, it really had happened.

I kicked in the direction of my divers, whose eyes were still wide from the encounter, only to have them signal me to stop and turn around. Until this moment, the whole experience had been phenomenal, but I could explain it. Now, the moment turned magical.

I turned and saw her slowly gliding toward me. With barely an effort, she approached me and stopped, her wing just touching my head. I looked into her round, dark eye, and she looked deeply into me. I felt a rush of something that so overpowered me, I have yet to find the words to describe it, except a warm and loving flow of energy from her into me.

She stayed with me for a moment. I don't know if it was a second or an hour. Then, as sweetly as she came back, she lifted her wing over my head and was gone. A manta thank-you.

I hung in midwater, using the safety-stop excuse, and tried to make sense of what I had experienced. Eventually, collecting myself, I surfaced and was greeted by an ecstatic group of divers and a curious captain. They all gave me time to get my heart started and to begin to breathe.

Sadly, I have not seen her since that day, and I am still looking. For the longest time, though my wetsuit was tattered and torn, I would not change it because I thought she wouldn't recognize me. I call to every manta I see, and they almost always acknowledge me in some way. One day, though, it will be her. She'll hear me and pause, remembering the giant cleaner that she trusted to relieve her pain, and she'll come. At least that is how it happens in my dreams.


Jennifer Anderson

It was a darling cap. It was crocheted with angora yarn, and attached to the soft peak at the top was a little ball of angora fuzz. Strings tied the cap securely under the chin.

Our little girl was six years old when we purchased the cap, and because of her susceptibility to earaches, we made sure she never left the house in the winter without it. But she hated that cap! She would think of any "reason" in the world not to wear it. Once she exhausted all excuses, she simply hid it.

One morning when the school-bus driver honked for her, we were again searching for the cap! "But I didn't hide it last night," our daughter wailed pitifully.

"You've hidden it before, so why should I believe you?" I asked.

Exasperated, I hurried her out the door to the waiting bus. Calling after her, I shouted, "Don't cry to me tonight when you have an earache!"

I closed my door and the bus drove away. As I gathered the laundry, my anger built. She knew exactly where she had hidden the cap. Muttering, I opened the washing machine and there I saw The Cap! Just where I had thrown it the night before!

How ashamed I felt. I paced the floor watching the clock. It would be 9:15 before first recess. Could I wait that long to tell her how sorry I was?

At 9:00, I drove up to school and parked by the playground. Finally, the bell rang, and the first-graders streamed out for recess. There she was! I stepped outside the car and called to her. Her face lit up when she saw me and she bounced toward me.

"It's my mommy!" she squealed to the friends who followed her. She threw her little arms around me, genuinely glad to see me. As I hugged her to me, tears filled my eyes.

"Oh, Lucinda," I cried. "I am so sorry. I found your cap where I put it last night. Can you please forgive me?" She looked puzzled for a moment, hugged me and, giggling, ran quickly back to play.

Years later, I found papers and notes from her college classes. As I opened one of her old notebooks, I came across an assignment sheet that an English professor had given her. The instructions on it were to write a paper about an incident in your life that had profoundly affected you.

Stapled to the sheet was the essay she had written. It was entitled, simply, "The Cap:" Across the top, the professor had written a glowing critique of the paper and marked it with an A-plus.

The final paragraph of the essay summed up the effect "the cap incident" had on her life: "...and I learned that I had a mother who could not only admit it when she made a mistake, but would even apologize for it...."

Molly Lemmons