CHUSH, CHUSH, SWEET VARLETS

In Brooklyn, New York, Chush is a school that caters to learning disabled children. Some children remain in Chush for their entire school career, while others can be mainstreamed into conventional schools.

At a Chush fundraising dinner, the father of a Chush child delivered a speech that would never be forgotten by all who attended.

After extolling the school and its dedicated staff, he cried out, "Where is the perfection in my son Shaya? Everything God does is done with perfection.

But my child cannot understand things as other children do. My child cannot remember facts and figures as other children do. Where is God's perfection? The audience was shocked by the question, pained by the father's anguish and stilled by the piercing query.

"I believe," the father answered, "that when God brings a child like this into the world, the perfection that he seeks is in the way people react to this child."

He then told the following story about his son Shaya.

One afternoon, Shaya and his father walked past a park where some boys Shaya knew were playing baseball. Shaya asked, "Do you think they will let me play?"

ON ATTITUDE

At ten minutes to seven on a dark, cool evening in Mexico City in 1968, John Stephen Arkari of Tanzania painfully hobbled into the Olympic Stadium - the last to finish in the marathon.

The winner had already been crowned and the victory ceremony was long finished. So the stadium was almost empty as Arkwari, alone, his leg bloody and bandaged, struggled to circle the track to the finish line. The respected documentary, Bud Greenspan, watched from a distance. Then, intrigued, Bud walked over to Arkwari and asked why he continued the grueling struggle to the finish line.

The young man from Tanzania answered softly, "My country did not send me nine thousand miles to start the race. They sent me nine thousand miles to finish the race."

The Gift

His parents acquired the washer when John Claypool was a small boy. It happened during World War II. His family owned no washing machine and, since gasoline was rationed, they could ill afford trips to the laundry several miles away. Keeping clothes clean became a problem for young John's household.

A family friend was drafted into the service, and his wife prepared to go with him. John's family offered to store their furniture while they were away. To the family's surprise, the friends suggested they use their Bendix while they were gone. "It would be better for it to be running," they said, "than sitting up rusting." So this is how they acquired the washer.

Young John helped with the washing, and across the years he developed an affection for the old, green Bendix. But eventually the war ended. Their friends returned. In the meantime he had forgotten how the machine came to be in their basement in the first place. When the friends came to take it away, John grew terribly upset -- and said so! His mother, wise as she was, sat him down and said, "Wait a minute, Son. You must remember, that machine never belonged to us in the first place. That we ever got to use it at all was a gift. So, instead of being mad at it being taken away, let's use this occasion to be grateful that we had it at all."

The lesson proved invaluable. Years later, John watched his eight-year-old daughter die a slow and painful death of leukemia. Though he struggled for months with her death, John could not begin healing from the loss until he remembered the old Bendix.

The Power of Worry

Death was walking toward a city one morning, and a man asked, "What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to take 100 people,"Death replied.

"That"s horrible!" the man said."That's the way it is."

Death said, "That's what I do."

The man hurried to warn everyone he could about Death's plan.