Inspiration

A stage mother cornered the concert violinist in his dressing room and insisted he listen to a tape of her talented son playing the violin.

The man agreed to listen, and the woman switched on the tape player. “What music!’” the violinist thought. A difficult piece, but played with such genius that it brought tears to his eyes. He listened spellbound to the entire recording.

“Madam,” he whispered, "is that your son?”

“No," she replied. “That’s Jascha Heifetz. But my son sounds just like him..”

"Faith means believing in advance what will only make sense in reverse."

- Philip Yancey

One of my duties as church secretary is to answer the phone and refer calls. The telephone rang one day with an urgent caller on the other end. He needed to talk to the senior pastor.

I quietly opened his office door to find him praying. I returned to the phone and politely told the caller,

"I'm sorry. He's in conference long distance."

Our house was directly across the street from the clinic entrance of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. We lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.

One summer evening as I was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. I opened it to see a truly awful looking man. "Why, he's hardly taller than my eight-year-old," I thought as I stared at the stooped, shriveled body. But the appalling thing was his face, lopsided from swelling, red and raw. Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, "Good evening. I've come to see if you've a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there's no bus 'til morning."