Inspiration

"In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt."

- Margaret Atwood

A big, burly man visited his pastor's home and asked to see the minister's wife, a woman well known for her charitable impulses.

"Madam," he said in a broken voice, "I wish to draw your attention to the terrible plight of a poor family in this district. The father of the family is dead, the mother is too ill to work, and the nine children are starving. They are about to be turned into the cold, empty streets unless someone pays their rent, which amounts to $400."

"How terrible!" exclaimed the preacher's wife. "May I ask who you are?"

They sympathetic visitor applied his handkerchief to his eyes. "I'm the landlord," he sobbed.

A nurse on the pediatric ward, before listening to the little one's chests, would plug the stethoscope into their ears and let them listen to their own hearts. Their eyes would always light up with awe, but he never got a response equal to four-year old David's comment.

Gently he tucked the stethoscope into David's ears and placed the disk over his heart. "Listen," he said..........."What do you suppose that is?"

David drew his eyebrows together in a puzzled line and looked up as if lost in the mystery of the strange "thump, thump-thump" deep in his chest.

Then his face broke out in a wondrous grin and he asked, "Is that Jesus knocking?"

"If Spring came but once a century instead of once a year, or burst forth with the sound of an earthquake and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow