By: Dennis Stackhouse

   A wayward young man ran away from home on one occasion.  This boy didn't even bother to let his parents know where he was.  As time went by, his father died.  He happened to read about it in the newspaper and then came home.  His mother received him kindly upon his return.  The day came when the will was to be read.  The family all gathered together and the lawyer began to read the deceased father's last will.  To the great surprise of all who were present, the will spoke about the wayward career of the run away son in great detail.  In anger, the boy rose up and stormed out of the room, left the house and was not heard from for three years.  When he was eventually found, he was informed that after telling of his waywardness, the will went on to bequeath him a considerable sum of money.  Can we imagine how much sorrow he would have been spared if he had only heard the reading of the will through to the end?

By: Dennis Stackhouse  

   How much fretting will we do today because of this or that or the other thing?  It should come as no surprise to us that life is filled with irritations, and there are times when we try to rebel against them.  Did you realize that the lowly oyster is wiser than we are in this regard?  Whenever an irritating object, like a grain of sand, gets under the mantle of its shell, what does the oyster do about it?  It simply covers it with the most precious part of its being, its very life fluid, and it makes a pearl out of it. The irritation that the grain of sand was causing is stopped by encrusting it with the pearly formation.