| Prior Date | Archive Index | Next Date |
|
WITandWISDOM(tm) - April 16, 2003 ISSN 1538-8794 ~~~~~~~ THOUGHTS: If you are looking for a friend who has no faults, you will have no friends. - Old Folk Saying Source: Thought for Today ~~~~~~~ SPECIAL THOUGHTS: The Weathered Old Barn A stranger came by the other day with an offer that set me to thinking. He wanted to buy the old barn that sits out by the highway. I told him right off he was crazy. He was a city type, you could tell by his clothes, his car, his hands, and the way he talked. He said he was driving by and saw that beautiful barn sitting out in the tall grass and wanted to know if it was for sale. I told him he had a funny idea of beauty. Sure, it was a handsome building in its day. But then, there's been a lot of winters pass with their snow and ice and howling wind. The summer sun's beat down on that old barn till all the paint's gone, and the wood has turned silver gray. Now the old building leans a good deal, looking kind of tired. Yet, that fellow called it beautiful. That set me to thinking. I walked out to the field and just stood there, gazing at that old barn. The stranger said he planned to use the lumber to line the walls of his den in a new country home he's building down the road. He said you couldn't get paint that beautiful. Only years of standing in the weather, bearing the storms and scorching sun, only that can produce beautiful barn wood. It came to me then. We're a lot like that, you and I. Only it's on the inside that the beauty grows with us. Sure we turn silver gray too...and lean a bit more than we did when we were young and full of sap. But the Good Lord knows what He's doing. And as the years pass He's busy using the hard wealth of our lives, the dry spells and the stormy seasons, to do a job of beautifying our souls that nothing else can produce. And to think how often folks holler because they want life easy! They took the old barn down today and hauled it away to beautify a rich man's house. And I reckon someday you and I'll be hauled off to Heaven to take on whatever chores the Good Lord has for us. And I suspect we'll be more beautiful then for the seasons we've been through here... and just maybe even add a bit of beauty to our Father's house. Source: Sermon Fodder, http://www.sermonfodder.com ~~~~~~~ THIS & THAT: "Bad Analogies" WITandWISDOM readers were invited to submit "bad analogies." One reader, Mark D. Raymond submitted the following: "His face lit up like a neon marquee with half the letters missing." "After finishing the entire cake herself, Alice felt as if she were wearing a Sumo Wrestler suit and the zipper was stuck." "Frank's knees were wobbly. Wobbly like a Weeble. Only he did fall down." "She loaded up on breath mints like a squirrel loads up on acorns so her cheeks puffed out like a bag of popcorn and her mouth was the microwave." "Harry realized he was alone. As alone as a rocket scientist at a convention of the Flat Earth Society." Belinda's life seemed like a bad dream; the kind where you're being chased by a bus underwater and the bus turns into a shark but you lose the shark by jumping off a cliff and land undressed on top of a carnival tent. There were days she felt just like that. Jeremy doesn't so much comb his hair, as beat it into submission, like you would a glob of dough used to make that friendship bread. It winds up looking about the same, too. She batted an eye at him, but he called it a swing and a miss. Ted's emotional laundry was dirty. Dirty and piled high in the dank, dark basement of his soul. And even if he could find the detergent, the fabric softener was nowhere in sight. He took one last, long, look at her picture then flipped it into the wastebasket as casually as a piece of junk mail. In the big CD of life, he was a hidden novelty track that never appeared on the label. By Mark D. Raymond, Copyright (c) 2003 mailto:baldmark@myexcel.com Mark is the editor of Flint Friday Funny mailto:baldmark@myexcel.com?subject=Subscribe_Flint_Friday_Funny ~~~~~~~ KEEP SMILING: My office at the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver notified reservists who were recalled to active duty during Operation Desert Storm. We had difficulty locating one female sergeant, but we finally obtained a phone number. I put the call through and asked for the woman by name. I explained that she was being reactivated and told her she would need to report to her duty station. "Do you understand?" I asked. There was a long pause at the other end of the line. "Honey, you just made my day," she said. "I'm 85 years old and raring to go!" Contributed to "Humor In Uniform" by TSgt. Belinda K. Bezpalko Source: DailyInBox: America in Uniform, http://your.dailyinbox.com/aiu/ ~~~~~~~ TRIVIA: Astronauts have been using them for power aboard spacecraft since the 1960s. Soon, perhaps, they'll be just as common on Earth--powering cars, trucks, laptop computers and cell phones. They're called fuel cells. By combining hydrogen fuel with oxygen, fuel cells can produce plenty of electric power while emitting only pure water as exhaust. They're so clean that astronauts actually drink the water produced by fuel cells on the space shuttle. For more information visit: http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2003/18mar_fuelcell.htm?list828011 Submitted by Debbie Yauch |