Hey Gang: I call them
the ‘empty-eye-syndrome’ generation.
When I look into their eyes I see no vision, no joy, no hope. Rabbi Cahn, in his monthly letter to his
spiritual family wrote the following:
“Imagine you’re on a
plane that’s about to leave and someone sits down next to you and you get to
talking with them and they ask you where you’re going, and you tell them. And then you ask them where they are going,
and they answer, “I’m here to go anywhere.
I have no destination. I’m just
here to leave the airport.” Would that
not be ridiculous. Virtually no one gets
on a plane just to leave somewhere; they get on a plane to go somewhere."
His name was Teddy Stoddard, and this was his first day in
Mrs. Thompson’s fifth grade class. She
started her first day of this new class in the same way she started every year
by telling the class she loved each one of them and her heart’s desire was that
all would do well and grow up to be very successful people.
But this year she made her speech with tongue in check, for
she had a boy named Teddy that she had watched the year before and noticed he
did not play with the other children, that his cloths were messy, and he constantly
needed a bath. Add to this, Teddy could
be very unpleasant.
Teddy lived up to his reputation and soon settled into his
norm of unpredictable, usually negative behavior, to the point where Mrs.
Thompson enjoyed placing “F’s” on his failed papers.
Then one day, she had reached her wits end and knew she
could not endure this young lads behavior one more day, but, before expelling
him from her class she went to the office and spent several hours going through
Teddy’s record.
She discovered in first grade the teacher wrote: “Teddy is a
bright child with a ready laugh, does his work well and has good manners.” In second grade she read, “Teddy is an
excellent student, well-liked by his classmates, but troubled because his
mother has terminal cancer”. In third
grade, it stuck out in very bold print:
“His mother’s death has been very hard on him and his father does not
seem to take much interest in him”. His
fourth grade teacher wrote, “Teddy, is with-drawn and doesn’t show much
interest in school, has few friends and often sleeps through class.
After reading the record Mrs. Thompson heart was filled with
shame and felt even worse when her students brought her Christmas gifts wrapped
in beautiful paper ; Teddy brought a bracelet with missing stones and a half
filled bottle of perfume in a brown paper bag.
The children laughed but Mrs. Thompson stood and put the broken bracelet
on and a dab of the perfume on and thanked Teddy for his kindness. After class Teddy went up and said to her,
she smelled just like his mom. She said
she cried for an hour after Teddy had gone home.
The story of Teddy Stoddard is one that is very special to
me, for I have seen this story repeated a thousand or more times in my years of
providing a shirttail for the ‘Teddy’s’ to grab hold of. I do not want to leave the story end here,
because the rest of the story is a perfect example of God’s promise that, if we
are willing to take up our cross daily and reach out to a hurting person, God
will richly bless our efforts.
I pray you will tune into the next Gramps blog and see a
real live miracle take place in the life of a young lad who was like the guy on
the airplane – he just did not know where he was going.
Blessings,
Gramps
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