Pure Thoughts

All entries in the ‘Stories’ Category

by: Author Unknown, Heart At Work

A while back, there was a story about Reuben Gonzolas, who was in the final match of his first professional racquetball tournament. He was playing the perennial champion for his first shot at a victory on the pro circuit. At match point in the fifth and final game, Gonzolas made a super “kill shot” into the front corner to win the tournament. The referee called it good, and one of the linemen confirmed the shot was a winner.

But after a moment’s hesitation, Gonzolas turned and declared that his shot had skipped into the wall, hitting the floor first. As a result, the serve went to his opponent, who went on to win the match.

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Technorati Tags: Integrity

-Henri Nouwen

I hope that I will always be for each person
what he or she needs me to be.
I hope that each person’s death will diminish me,
but that fear of my own will never diminish my joy of life.
I hope that my love for those whom I like will never lessen
my love for those whom I do not.
I hope that another person’s love for me will never
be a measure of my love for him or her.
I hope that everybody will accept me as I am,
but that I never will.
I hope that I will always ask for forgiveness from others,
but will never need to be asked for my own . . .
I hope that I will always recognize my limitations,
but that I will construct none.
I hope that loving will always be my goal,
but that love will never be my idol.
I hope that everyone will always have hope.

Technorati Tags: Hope

Last week I took my children to a restaurant. My six-year-old son asked if he could say grace. As we bowed our heads he said, “God is great and God is Good. Let us thank Him for the food, and I would even thank you more if mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And Liberty and justice for all! Amen!”

Along with the laughter from the other customers nearby, I heard a woman remark, “That’s what’s wrong with this country. Kids today don’t even know how to pray. Asking God for ice-cream! Why, I never!”

Hearing this, my son burst into tears and asked me, “Did I do it wrong? is God mad at me?” As I held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job and God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly gentleman approached the table. He winked at my son and said, “I happen to know that God thought that was a great prayer.” “Really?” my son asked. “Cross my heart.”

Then in theatrical whisper he added (indicating the woman whose remark had started this whole thing), “Too bad she never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is good for the soul sometimes.”

Naturally, I bought my kids ice cream at the end of the meal. My son stared at his for a moment and then did something I will remember the rest of my life. He picked up his sundae and without a word walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, “Here, this is for you. Ice cream is good for the soul sometimes and my soul is good already.”

Technorati Tags: Family, Inspiring, Parenting

- Kath Ponsford

I’m trapped, trapped inside myself, I want to get out, get out and be free. I don’t want to live in my shell, But I’m scared, scared to take away my mask.

Friends are forever letting me down, No matter how close they are. They are there if I have a problem, But when I don’t I may as well not exist.

I want someone to trust and care about me, Someone to cry on and someone to listen. I want someone to love me for who I am, Not the masked me me whom everyone knows.

Unfortunately none of this can ever come true, Not from someone on this earth anyway. No one I know is perfect, No one I know can fulfil this.

Except…

Someone I know who is watching down on everyone of us. He has a special plane and a purpose for anyone who turns to Him. There will still be hardship and sorrow, But these will make you strong.

He can be trusted, he is ever so faithful. He cares deeply about each person on this earth. He can be cried upon, and will cry with you. He even puts each tear we cry in a bottle. He is the best listener anyone could be, And most of all He loves us for who we are, No matter what we have done.

“Who could do all this?” I hear you ask. It’s a very dear and special friend of mine called Jesus, With whom I can take away my mask and be free.

Technorati Tags: Trapped

This was my grandmother’s first Christmas without grandfather, and we had promised him before he passed away that we would make this her best Christmas ever. When my mom, dad, three sisters and I arrived at her little house in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, we found she had waited up all night for us to arrive from Texas. After we exchanged hugs, my sisters and I ran into the house. It did seem a little empty without grandfather, and we knew it was up to us to make this Christmas special for her.

Grandfather had always said that the Christmas tree was the most important decoration of all. So we immediately set to work on the beautiful artificial tree that was kept stored in grandfather’s closet. Although artificial, it was the most genuine looking Douglas fir I had ever seen. Tucked away in the closet with the tree was a spectacular array of ornaments, many of which had been my father’s when he was a little boy. As we unwrapped each one, grandmother had a story to go along with it. My mother strung the tree with bright white lights and a red button garland; my sisters and I carefully placed the ornaments on the tree; and finally father was given the honor of lighting the tree.

We stepped back to admire our handiwork. To us, it looked magnificent, as beautiful as the tree in Rockefeller Center. But something was missing.

“Where’s your star’” I asked.

The star was my grandmother’s favorite part of the tree, for it represented the star of Bethlehem that had led the wise men to the infant Jesus.

“Why, it must be here somewhere,” she said, starting to sort through the boxes again. “Your grandfather always packed everything so carefully when he took the tree down.”

As we emptied box after box and found no star, my grandmother’s eyes filled with tears. This was no ordinary ornament, but an elaborate golden star covered with colored jewels and blue lights that blinked on and off. Moreover, grandfather had given it to grandmother some fifty years ago on their first Christmas together. Now, on her first Christmas without him, the star was gone, too.

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Technorati Tags: Christmas

by P. E. Adotey Addo

It was the night before Christmas and I was very sad because my family life had been severely disrupted and I was sure that Christmas would never come. There was none of the usual joy and anticipation that I always felt during the Christmas season. I was eight years old but in the past few months I had grown a great deal. Before this year, I thought Christmas in my village came with many things. Christmas had always been for me one of the joyous religious festivals. It was the time for beautiful Christmas music on the streets, on radio, television, and every where. Christmas had always been a religious celebration and the church started preparing way back in November. We really felt that we were preparing for the birth of the baby Jesus. Christmas was the time when relatives and friends visited each other so there were always people traveling and visiting with great joy from all the different tribes. I always thought that was all Christmas was.

Oh, how I wished I had some of the traditional food consumed at the Christmas Eve dinner and the Christmas Day dinner, I knew I could not taste the rice, chicken, goat, lamb, and fruits of various kinds. The houses were always decorated with beautiful paper ornaments. The children and all the young people loved to make and decorate their homes and schools with colorful crepe paper. All of us looked forward to the Christmas Eve Service at our church. After the service there would be a joyous possession through the streets. Everyone would be in a gala mood with local musicians in a Mardi Gras mood. Then on Christmas Day we all went back to church to read the scriptures and sing carols to remind us of the meaning of the blessed birth of the baby Jesus. We always thought that these were the things that meant Christmas. After the Christmas service young people received gifts of special chocolate, special cookies, and special crackers. Young people were told that the gifts come from Father Christmas, and this always meant Christmas for us. They also received new clothes and perhaps new pairs of shoes. Meanwhile throughout the celebration, everyone was greeted with the special greeting word, “Afishapa” meaning Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Oh how I wish that those memories were real tonight in order to bring us Christmas. However, this Christmas Eve things were different and I knew Christmas would never come. Every one was sad and desperate because of what happened last April when the so-called Army of Liberation attacked our village and took all the young boys and girls away.

Families were separated and some were murdered. We were forced to march and work for many miles without food. We were often hungry and we were given very little food. There was very little food. The soldiers burned everything in our village and during our forced march we lost all sense of time and place. Miraculously we were able to get away from the soldiers during one rainy night. After several weeks in the tropical forest we made our way back to our burned out village. Most of us were sick, exhausted, and depressed. Most of the members of our families were no where to be found. We had no idea what day or time it was. This was the situation until my sick grandmother noticed the reddish and yellow flower we call, “Fire on the Mountain,” blooming in the middle of the marketplace where the tree had stood for generations and had bloomed for generations at Christmas time. For some reason it had survived the fire that had engulfed the marketplace. I remembered how the nectar from this beautiful flower had always attracted insects making them drowsy enough to fall to the ground to become food for crows and lizards. We were surprised that the fire the soldiers started to burn the marketplace and the village did not destroy the “Fire on the Mountain” tree. What a miracle it was. Grandmother told us that it was almost Christmas because the flower was blooming. As far as she could remember this only occurred at Christmas time. My spirits were lifted perhaps for a few minutes as I saw the flower. Soon I became sad again. How could Christmas come without my parents and my village? How could this be Christmas time when we celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, because since April we have not known any peace, only war and suffering. How could we celebrate as grandmother instructed us to do before she died. Those were the last words she spoke before she died last night. As I continued to think about past joyous Christmases and the present suffering, we heard the horn of a car and not just one horn but several cars approaching our village. At first we thought they were cars full of men with machine guns so we hid in the forest. To our surprise they were not and they did not have guns. They were just ordinary travelers. It seemed the bridge over the river near our village had been destroyed last April as the soldiers left our village. Since it was almost dusk and there were rumors that there were land mines on the roads, they did not want to take any chances. Their detour had led them straight to our village. When they saw us they were shocked and horrified at the suffering and the devastation all around us. Many of these travelers began to cry. They confirmed that tonight was really Christmas Eve. All of them were on their way to their villages to celebrate Christmas with family and friends. Now circumstances had brought them to our village at this time on this night before Christmas. They shared the little food they had with us. They even helped us to build a fire in the center of the marketplace to keep us warm. In the middle of all this, my sister became ill and could not stand up. A short time after we returned to our village my grandmother told me that my oldest sister was expecting a baby. My sister had been in a state of shock and speechless since we all escaped from the soldiers. I was so afraid for my sister because we did not have any medical supplies and we were not near a hospital. Some of the travelers and the villagers removed their shirts and clothes to make a bed for my sister to lie near the fire we had made. On that fateful night my sister gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. This called for a celebration, war or no war, Africans have to dance and we celebrated until the rooster crowed at 6 a.m. We sang Christmas songs. Every one sang in his or her own language. For the first time all the pain and agony of the past few months escaped. When morning finally came my sister was asked, “What are you going to name the baby”? Would you believe for the first time since our village was burned and all the young girls and boys were taken away, she spoke. She said, “His name is Gye Nyame, which means except God I fear none.”

And so we celebrated Christmas that night. Christmas really did come to our village that night, but it did not come in the cars or with the travelers. It came in the birth of my nephew in the midst of our suffering. We saw hope in what this little child could do. This birth turned out to be the universal story of how bad things turned into universal hope, the hope we found in the Baby Jesus. A miracle occurred that night before Christmas and all of a sudden I knew we were not alone any more. Now I knew there was hope and I had learned that Christmas comes in spite of all circumstances. Christmas is always within us all. Christmas came even to our village that night.

Technorati Tags: Christmas

It’s just a small, white envelope stuck among the branches of our Christmas tree. No name, no identification, no inscription. It has peeked through the branches of our tree for the past 10 years or so. It all began because my husband Mike hated Christmas-oh, not the true meaning of Christmas, but the commercial aspects of it-overspending, the frantic running around at the last minute to get a tie for Uncle Harry and the dusting powder for Grandma-the gifts given in desperation because you couldn’t think of anything else.

Knowing he felt this way, I decided one year to bypass the usual shirts, sweaters, ties and so forth. I reached for something special just for Mike. The inspiration came in an unusual way.

Our son Kevin, who was 12 that year, was wrestling at the junior level at the school he attended; and shortly before Christmas, there was a non-league match against a team sponsored by an inner-city church, mostly black. These youngsters, dressed in sneakers so ragged that shoestrings seemed to be the only thing holding them together, presented
a sharp contrast to our boys in their spiffy blue and gold uniforms and sparkling new wrestling shoes. As the match began, I was alarmed to see that the other team was wrestling without headgear, a kind of light helmet designed to protect a wrestler’s ears. It was a luxury the ragtag team obviously could not afford. Well, we ended up walloping them. We took every weight class. And as each of their boys got up from the mat, he
swaggered around in his tatters with false bravado, a kind of street pride that couldn’t acknowledge defeat. Mike, seated beside me, shook his head sadly, “I wish just one of them could have won,” he said. “They have a lot of potential, but losing like this could take the heart right out of them.”

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Technorati Tags: Christmas Envelope

by: Sandra Chereb

For decades, Jay Thiessens hid a painful secret as he built his machine and tool company from a mom-and-pop operation into a $5 million-a-year enterprise. During the day he hid behind the role of a harried businessman, too busy to review contracts or shuffle through mail. At night, his wife, Bonnie, would help him sort through the paperwork at the kitchen table, in the living room, or sometimes sitting up in bed.

Other tasks he delegated to a core group of managers at B&J Machine Tool Co. who had no idea their boss couldn’t read.

“I worked for him for seven years and I had no clue,” said Jack Sala, now the engineering manager for Truckee Precision, a B&J competitor. “I was his general manager. He would bring legal stuff to me and say, ‘You’re better at legalese than me.’ I never knew I was the only one reading them.”

Few people knew of his shame and most burning desire: To be able to read a simple bedtime story to his grandchildren. But he couldn’t keep his illiteracy secret forever. “It became too hard to continue to hide it,” said Thiessens, who has begun to read at the age of 56. “Since I made the decision to let everybody know, it’s a big relief.”

On Wednesday, Thiessens will be honored in Washington, D.C., as one of six national winners of the 1999 National Blue Chip Enterprise Initiative Award. Sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and MassMutual, the award recognizes small businesses that have triumphed over adversity.

Thiessens’ torment took root when he was in the first or second grade in McGill, a small mining town in central Nevada. “A teacher called me stupid because I had trouble reading,” he said. All through school, he was the quiet little boy in the back of the room.

“I think the teachers just got tired of looking at me so they passed me on,” he said. He graduated from White Pine High School in Ely 1963, getting mostly C’s, D’s and F’s. He made the honor roll once, in his senior

year when he landed A’s in auto mechanics and machine shop.

The day after graduation, Thiessens moved to Reno, where 10 years later he started a small machine shop with his last $200. Today, B&J specializes in welding, machine parts and precision sheet metal work. With 50 employees, the company conducts $5 million a year in business and just broke ground on

a new 54,000 square-foot expansion.

Despite his success, the stigma of being labeled a dummy haunted him through adulthood. He compensated by being a good listener. He rarely forgets details and has a solid grasp of math and figures, a trait essential to the industry, others say.

“The majority of everything we do is technical,” said Randy Arnett of A&B Precision, B&J’s longest competitor. “It has more to do with math, geometrical shapes, than verbiage.”

“He’s always been a decent competitor,” Arnett said of Thiessens.

Two years ago, Thiessens was invited to join a local chapter of The Executive Committee, a kind of CEO-support group where non-competing chief executives discuss business trials and tribulations in confidence.

Thiessens was reluctant. “He was concerned he wouldn’t measure up to the rest of the group,” said Randy Yost, committee chairman and former CEO of Placer Bank of Commerce in California. “About 6 months after we met, he told me he had a reading problem,” Yost said. “At that time, he was very tight-vested about it.”

Thiessens confessed to the rest of the group last year.

“He was a little teary. His voice was shaking,” recalled Doug Damon, a group member and CEO of Damon Industries, a beverage concentrate manufacturer. “It was clearly a difficult thing for him to do.” Damon was surprised by Thiessens confession. “I knew he was a high school graduate, and so I guess I automatically assumed he knew how to read. He’d been very successful in his business. Who would have thought?”

Thiessens feared titters and jeers from his college-educated CEO peers. Instead, he was overwhelmed by support. “As much as I respected him for what he accomplished, it enhanced my respect for him,” Yost said.

Last October, Thiessens found a tutor to instruct him for an hour a day, five days a week. That’s also when he told his plant managers. The rest of his employees found out last month.

Thiessens recently read “Gung Ho,” a book on employee relations, as a management team project. It was slow going as he underlined all the words he didn’t know and later sought help with. But he finished it. He wants someday to be able to rifle through mail as quickly as his wife and “round file” the piles of junk mail that comes across his desk.

More importantly, he hopes his story will encourage others to learn to read.

“There is no shame in not knowing how to read,” said Mrs. Thiessens, his wife of 37 years. “The shame is not doing anything about it.”

Technorati Tags: Success

And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more. – Erica Jong 1942

Technorati Tags: Risks

A Taoist story tells of an old man who accidentally fell into the river rapids leading to a high and dangerous waterfall. Onlookers feared for his life. Miraculously, he came out alive and unharmed downstream at the bottom of the falls. People asked him how he managed to survive. “I accommodated myself to the water, not the water to me. Without thinking, I allowed myself to be shaped by it. Plunging into the swirl, I came out with the swirl. This is how I survived.”

Technorati Tags: Going with the Flow