Prison Sounds More Relaxing

Maria Brunner, of Poing, Germany, was willing to go to jail to get a break.

Brunner’s husband is unemployed, so she supports their three young children by cleaning other people’s houses. Even without a job, her husband managed to run up $5,000 worth of unpaid parking tickets. The husband kept the tickets a secret, but as the owner of the vehicle, Maria was responsible. She couldn’t pay the fine, and unless her husband could come up with the money, she would spend three months in jail.

She welcomed the thought. “I’ve had enough of scraping a living for the family,” she says. “As long as I get food and a hot shower every day, I don’t mind being sent to jail. I can finally get some rest and relaxation.”

Police reported that Maria repeatedly thanked them for arresting her.

 — “Family of the Week,” 
timesonline.co.uk (May 15, 2005)

The Name Does Not Make The Man

Take Edwin Thomas, for instance. Edwin Thomas Booth, that is. At age fifteen he debuted on the stage playing Tressel to his father’s Richard III. Within a few short years he was playing the lead in Shakespearean tragedies throughout the United States and Europe. He was the Olivier of his time. He brought a spirit of tragedy that put him in a class by himself.

Edwin had a younger brother, John, who was also an actor. Although he could not compare with his older brother, he did give a memorable interpretation of Brutus in the 1863 production of Julius Caesar, by the New York Winter Garden Theater. Two years later, he performed his last role in a theater when he jumped from the box of a bloodied President Lincoln to the stage of Ford’s Theater. John Wilkes Booth met the end he deserved. But his murderous life placed a stigma over the life of his brother Edwin.

An invisible asterisk now stood beside his name in the minds of the people. He was no longer Edwin Booth the consummate tragedian, but Edwin Booth the brother of the assassin. He retired from the stage to ponder the question why? 

Edwin Booth’s life was a tragic accident simply because of his last name. The sensationalists wouldn’t let him separate himself from the crime.

It is interesting to note that he carried a letter with him that could have vindicated him from the sibling attachment to John Wilkes Booth. It was a letter from General Adams Budeau, Chief Secretary to General Ulysses S. Grant, thanking him for a singular act of bravery. It seems that while he was waiting for a train on the platform at Jersey City, a coach he was about to board bolted forward. He turned in time to see that a young boy had slipped from the edge of the pressing crowd into the path of the oncoming train. Without thinking, Edwin raced to the edge of the platform and, linking his leg around a railing, grabbed the boy by the collar. The grateful boy recognized him, but he didn’t recognize the boy. It wasn’t until he received the letter of thanks that he learned it was Robert Todd Lincoln, the son of his brother’s future victim. 

Tim Kimmel, Little House on the Freeway (Multnomah Books, 2008)

Glad To Have Helped

In 1999, Kevin Stephan of Lancaster, New York, was a batboy for his younger brother’s Little League baseball team. During one game, a player who was warming up accidentally hit Kevin in the chest with a bat. Kevin fell to the ground, unconscious. His heart stopped beating.

“All I remember is that, all of a sudden, I got hit in the chest with something, and I turned around and passed out,” Kevin says. Penny Brown, a nurse whose son played on the team, was able to revive Kevin.

Seven years later, Penny Brown was eating at the Hillview Restaurant in Depew, New York, when she began to choke on her food. “The food wasn’t going anywhere, and I totally couldn’t breathe,” said Penny. “It was very frightening.”

Patrons screamed for help. One of the restaurant employees — a volunteer firefighter — ran out from the back. He wrapped his arms around the victim, applied the Heimlich maneuver, and saved the woman’s life. The firefighter was Kevin Stephan, the boy whom Penny had saved seven years earlier.

 — Aaron Saykin, “Teen Saves Life 
of Woman Who Once Saved His,” 
wusatv9.com (February 4, 2006)

Don't Believe Everything You Hear

Winston Churchill exemplified integrity and respect in the face of opposition.

During his last year in office, he attended an official ceremony. Several rows behind him two gentlemen began whispering. "That's Winston Churchill." "They say he is getting senile." "They say he should step aside and leave the running of the nation to more dynamic and capable men."

When the ceremony was over, Churchill turned to the men and said, "Gentlemen, they also say he is deaf!"

- Barbara Hatcher, Vital Speeches (May 1, 1987)

Can't Afford To Forget

"On a business trip in California, I realized that I had forgotten my wife's birthday.  Assuming I was in big trouble, I went to the jewelry section of a San Francisco department store.  After explaining to the saleswoman that I desperately needed a gift to make up for my forgetfulness, she quipped, 'I'm sorry, but we don't have anything that expensive.'"

- Edwin L. Ray, Reader's Digest, quoted in The Story File (Hendrickson Publishers, 2000)

Fat And Pretty

The little boy loved his mother and loved to sit on her lap.  One day the boy was sitting on his mother's lap while she was reading a book to him.  After she finished the book, he cuddled up close to her and said, "I love you, Mommy!"

His mother was grateful for his love but mistakenly questioned the worth of its object.  She asked, "How can you love a mother who is so fat and ugly?"

The son quickly protested, "Oh, Mommy, you are not!  You're fat and pretty!"

- Parables, Etc. (March 1996)

A Meaningful Life Despite An Injury

Dennis Byrd was an up-and-coming defensive superstar for the New York Jets, who was expected to help turn the Jets around. But on November 29, 1992, when the Jets were playing the Chiefs, Byrd was about to sack the quarterback when he collided with a teammate. His spinal cord snapped.

He awoke in the middle of the night at Lenox Hospital in a halo brace, not knowing where he was, why he couldn’t move, and what was happening. Suddenly, he went from dreaming of making it to the Pro Bowl to hoping that someday he could once more hold his daughter in his arms.

From a worldly perspective, Byrd was no longer able to reach his potential. But in God’s eyes, Byrd was capable of more than sacking quarterbacks. As the world watched and listened, Byrd told the media that Christ was his source of comfort in his time of tragedy. The doctors said Byrd would likely never walk again, but Byrd said that with God’s help, he would.

On opening day of the 1993 football season, less than a year after his spinal-cord injury, Byrd walked to the middle of the Meadowlands Stadium while 75,000 fans cheered. The miracle in Byrd’s life is not that he broke his neck and walked again. The miracle is that the injury that destroyed his career didn’t destroy his life.

 — Steve May, Sermonnotes.com

What Giving Thanks Can Bring

During the Depression, William Stidger was in a restaurant with friends who were all talking about how terrible things were: suffering people, rich people committing suicide, joblessness. The conversation got more miserable as it went on.

A minister in the group interrupted. “In two or three weeks I have to preach a sermon on Thanksgiving Day,” he said. “What can I say that’s affirmative in a period of world depression like this?”

Stidger felt the Spirit of God saying to him, “Why don’t you give thanks to those people who have been a blessing in your life and affirm them during this terrible time?”

He began to think about that. He remembered a schoolteacher who was very dear to him, a wonderful teacher of poetry and English literature who had gone out of her way to put a great love of literature and verse in him, which has affected all his writings and his preaching. So he sat down and wrote a letter to this woman, now up in years. It was only a matter of days until he got a reply in the feeble scrawl of the aged:

My dear Willy,
I can’t tell you how much your note meant to me. I am in my 80s, living alone in a small room, cooking my own meals, lonely, and like the last leaf of autumn lingering behind. You’ll be interested to know that I taught in school for more than fifty years, and yours is the first note of appreciation I ever received. It came on a blue, cold morning, and it cheered me as nothing has done in many years.

“I’m not sentimental, but I found myself weeping over that note,” Stidger said. Then he thought of a kind bishop, now retired, who had recently faced the death of his wife and was all alone. This bishop had taken a lot of time giving Stidger advice and counsel and love when he first began his ministry. So he sat down and wrote the old bishop. In two days a reply came back.

My dear Will,
Your letter was so beautiful, so real, that as I sat reading it in my study, tears of gratitude fell from my eyes. Before I realized what I was doing, I rose from my chair and I called my wife’s name to share it with her, forgetting she was gone. You’ll never know how much your letter has warmed my spirit. I have been walking around in the glow of your letter all day long.

 — David A. Seamands, “Instruction for Thanksgiving,” Preaching Today Audio, no. 62

Longing For The Everyday Boring Scene

Greta Weissman was among the prisoners in a Nazi death camp.  She recalled an episode one spring when she and her fellow inmates stood at roll call for hours on end, nearly collapsing with hunger and fatigue.  But they noticed in the corner of that bleak, horrid, gray place that the concrete had broken and a flower had poke its head through.  And the thousands of women there took great pains to avoid stepping on it.  It was the only spot of beauty in their ugly and heinous world, and they were thankful for it.

Later in a radio interview, she added: "When people ask me, 'Why did you go on?' there is only one picture that comes to mind.  The moment was when once I stood at the window of the first camp I was in and asked myself if, by some miraculous power, one wish could be granted me, what would it be?  And then, with almost crystal clarity, the picture that came to my mind was a picture at home--my father smoking his pipe, my mother working at her needlepoint, my brother and I doing our homework.  And I remember thinking, my goodness, it was just a boring evening at home.  I had known countless evenings like that.  And I knew that this picture would be, if I could help it, the driving force of my survival."

- Dr. Julius Segal, Winning Life's Toughest Battles (Ivy Books, 1896)

Anyone Can Be Generous

"NBC Nightly News" carried the story of the retirement of an unusual volunteer at Pittsburg Children's Hospital. His name is Albert Lexie. Lexie shined shoes there two days a week, but there is a lot more to the story. Lexie had been shining the shoes since 1981. He only charged $5, but said anything more than that amount was given to a free care fund at the hospital for people who can't pay their bills. His first year, Albert donated $750. That rose to more than $11,000 in 2012. In all, he donated more than $200,000. Albert served in a humble way, using his particular gift, which reaped great rewards for others. On the day of his retirement, there were news cameras, applause and many tears.

- The Daily Nightly (December 18, 2013)

Short Cuts Lead To Trouble

Bob Harris, weatherman for NY TV station WPIX-TV and the nationally syndicated independent Network news, had to weather a public storm of his own making in 1979. Though he had studied math, physics and geology at three colleges, he left school without a degree but with a strong desire to be a media weatherman.

He phoned WCBS-TV, introducing himself as a Ph.D. in geophysics from Columbia U. The phony degree got him in the door. After a two-month tryout, he was hired as an off-camera forecaster for WCBS. For the next decade his career flourished. He became widely known as "Dr. Bob." He was also hired by the New York Times as a consulting meteorologist. The same year both the Long Island Railroad and then Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn hired him. Forty years of age and living his childhood dream, he found himself in public disgrace and national humiliation when an anonymous letter prompted WCBS management to investigate his academic credentials. Both the station and the New York Times fire him.

His story got attention across the land. He was on the Today Show, the Tomorrow Show, and in People Weekly, among others. He thought he'd lose his home and never work in the media again. Several days later the Long Island Railroad and Bowie Kuhn announced they would not fire him. Then WNEW-TV gave him a job. He admits it was a dreadful mistake on his part and doubtless played a role in his divorce. "I took a shortcut that turned out to be the long way around, and one day the bill came due. I will be sorry as long as I am alive."

- Nancy Shulins, Journal News, Nyack, NY

I'm Not Learning How To Quit

Somewhere I read the story of a young boy trying to learn to ice-skate.  He had fallen so many times that his face was cut, and the blood and tears ran together.

Someone, out of sympathy, skated over to the boy, picked him up, and said, "Son, why don't you quit?  You are going to kill yourself!"

The boy brushed the tears from his eyes and said, "I didn't buy these skates to learn how to quit; I bought them to learn how to skate."

- submitted by Malcom McPhail, Parables, Etc. (April 1992)

Being Versus Doing President

In the spring of 1970, when I was twenty-nine, I learned I had won a fellowship from the American Council on Education, which would allow me to serve an administrative internship with Purdue University President Fred Hovde for the 1970 – 71 academic year. I was elated by the opportunity. Despite having only recently been awarded tenure and promoted to associate professor of electrical engineering at Purdue, I was already leaning toward a career in administration. . . .

Soon after the award was announced, I happened to bump into a colleague, Vern Newhouse, who was a highly respected senior member of the electrical engineering faculty. “So, Sample,” Newhouse said to me, “I see you’ve won some sort of administrative fellowship in the president’s office.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said.

“And you’ll be learning how to become an administrator?”

“I suppose so.”

“And then you’ll probably want to be president of a university somewhere down the road?”

“Well, I don’t know. I guess I’ve thought about it now and then,” I said, somewhat disingenuously.

He smiled and said, “Personally, I’ve never had any ambition whatsoever to be an administrator. I am totally inept at managing things. . . . But I’ve been a careful observer of ambitious men all my life. And here, for what it’s worth, is what I’ve learned: many men want to be president, but very few want to do president.” And with that he wished me well and walked away.

 — Steve Sample, The Contrarian’s Guide 
to Leadership (Jossey-Bass, 2002)

Comfort In Writing

ABC News reported on April 14,1999, about a new study that found that patients with arthritis or asthma often got better writing about terrible experiences in their lives such as a car wreck or the death of a loved one.  A group of 112 patients spent a total of just one hour writing.  Four months later, nearly half of those who wrote about stressful events had improved significantly.

The study is believed to be the first to examine how writing about stressful events affects specific illnesses.  It was conducted at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, and it reinforces similar studies that have shown the health benefits for healthy people who wrote about stressful events.

- abcnews.go.com

Crime Pays... Embarrassingly

Carlos Carrasco, twenty-four, was sentenced to ten year's probation in San Antonio for a bungled burglary of a liquor store.  According to records, Carrasco cut his hand badly when he broke through the store's roof; he tried to throw a bottle of whiskey out through the hole he had created but missed, causing the bottle to fall back to the floor, shatter, and set off a burglar alarm; he fell on the broken bottle, cutting himself again; he left his wallet in the store; once on the roof for his getaway, he fell off; and he left a trail of blood from the store to his home down the street.

- Parables, Etc. (October, 1993)

Give Me Back My Troubles!

A dozen discounted figures in a community once visited a wise man, clamorning to tell their problems.

"Write your biggest problem down on a piece of paper," said the wise man, "and six of you stand here to my right and six to my left. Now exchange papers and you will have new trouble to fret about."

The malcontents complies.  Within a minute, all were clamoring to have their own troubles back!

- Bits & Pieces (The Economics Press, Inc. 1996)

Incompatibility? Really???

On his April 2, 1979 radio broadcast, Paul Harvey, amazement in his voice, reported that Romeo Bitencourt of Porto Alegre, Brazil, had just been granted a divorce.

Romeo was a Brazilian farmer.

He was ninety years old, had been married sixty-five years, had twelve children, fifty grandchildren, and thirty-six great-grandchildren.

The reason given for the divorce?

"Incompatibility."

- quoted by Robert J. Morgan, Preacher's Sourcebook of Creative Sermon Illustrations (Thomas Nelson, 2007)

Individual Attention Needed

When I left for college, my mother — who had always done my laundry — made a canvas duffel bag for me. “Put your dirty clothes in this every night,” she said. “At the end of the week, wash them at the Laundromat.”

Seven days later, I took my dirty clothes to the Laundromat. To save time, I threw the duffel bag in the washer, put in some laundry powder, inserted the proper change, and turned on the machine.  Moments later, a loud thump, thump, thump, thump echoed through the Laundromat. A pretty coed approached me with a grin. “I watched you load your washer. I think the clothes would get cleaner if you took them out of the bag.”

 — Roger Barrier, Listening to the 
Voice of God (Bethany, 1998)

What Accident?

Friends of George Burns have always kidded him about his singing. Burns, a master of self-deprecating humor, decided to take advantage of this and insure his voice for a million dollars. He thought it would be a wonderful publicity stunt.

"I was so excited," said Burns, "I couldn't wait to rush down to the insurance company. I took a cassette and a tape recorder with me so the insurance man could hear my voice. It was one of my best numbers -- a syncopated version of Yankee Doodle Blues with a yodeling finish. The insurance man listened patiently to the whole thing, then he just looked at me and said, 'Mr. Burns, you should have come to us before you had the accident.'"

- Bits & Pieces (March 3, 1994)

Move, Why Don't Ya?

In 1937 architect Frank Lloyd Wright built a house for industrialist Hibbard Johnson. One rainy evening Johnson was entertaining distinguished guests for dinner when the roof began to leak. The water seeped through directly above Johnson himself, dripping steadily onto his bald head. Irate, he called Wright in Phoenix, Arizona. “Frank,” he said, “you built this beautiful house for me and we enjoy it very much. But I have told you the roof leaks, and right now I am with some friends and distinguished guests and it is leaking right on top of my head.”

Wright’s reply was heard by all of the guests. “Well, Hib, why don’t you move your chair?”

- Today in the Word, Moody Bible Institute (Jan, 1992)

Giving Others A Push

Jean Nidetch, a 214 pound homemaker desperate to lose weight, went to the New York City Department of Health, where she was given a diet devised by Dr. Norman Jolliffe.

Two months later, discouraged about the 50 plus pounds still to go, she invited six overweight friends home to share the diet and talk about how to stay on it. Today, 28 years later, one million members attend 25,0000 Weight Watchers meetings in 24 countries every week. Why was Nidetch able to help people take control of their lives? 

To answer that, she tells a story. When she was a teen-ager, she used to cross a park where she saw mothers gossiping while the toddlers sat on their swings, with no one to push them. "I’d give them a push," says Nidetch. "And you know what happens when you push a kid on a swing? Pretty soon he’s pumping, doing it himself. That’s what my role in life is--I’m there to give others a push." 

- shared by SermonCentral.com

Inadequate Communication

A patient complained of an earache.  His right ear.  So his doctor prescribed him eardrops--antibiotic. The doctor prescribed eardrops for an earache.  

When the patient got the eardrops prescription filled the pharmacist wrote on the bottle... Three drops in r--for right--ear.  No space and no punctuation.  For "right ear," the instructions on the bottle read: r--ear.

That spells rear.

The patient said later he knew it sounded like a strange remedy for an earache but he had dutifully applied the three drops to his rear for three days before the error was discovered.

- reported by Paul Harvey on his radio broadcast on January 15, 1982; story was confirmed by the American Medical News

It's Difficult To Find Anything When You're Drunk

The defense attorney for a drunk driver was asking all the right questions. The arresting officer had testified that the defendant, when asked to produce his car registration, had fumbled around endlessly in the glove compartment.

“But it was dark, was it not?” asked the lawyer.

“Yes,” said the policeman.

“Was the glove compartment cluttered?”

“Yes.”

“How long did he fumble around there?”

“Maybe five minutes,” responded the officer.

“Well,” continued the attorney, “do you find it unusual that a man would take his time looking in a dark and cluttered glove compartment for a small piece of paper?”

“Yes,” replied the officer. “He was sitting in my patrol car at the time.”

- Dan Rodricks in Baltimore, Sunday Sun Magazine, quoted in Reader’s Digest, October 1982