Encouragement

A horse shot twice with a crossbow survived after four fellow mares spent three hours taking turns licking the wound clean.

The 20-year-old horse, Zeta, was in critical condition after one of the arrows bounced off her rib, while another lodged an inch from her lung as she grazed in a field in the U.K. Zeta's owner, Jo Young, said the four other horses saved Zeta’s life.

In 1934, a British magazine told the story of young Prince Edward and a visit he made to a small hospital where thirty-six hopelessly injured and disfigured veterans of the First World War were tended. He stopped at each cot, shook hands with each veteran, and spoke words of encouragement. He was conducted to the exit but observed that he had only met twenty-nine men. At that point he questioned those present, “I understood you had thirty-six patients here. I have only seen twenty-nine.”

We ought to know better than to despair over the visible result of spiritual endeavor. During a recent visit to Johannesburg I spent a day at one of the gold-mines. There was immense activity, gangs of workers, clouds of dust, hissing steam, deafening stamps, heaps of quartz, torrents of water and cauldrons of slime; but I came away without having seen a single speck of gold. The engineer touched the bottom of a turbid stream, and exclaimed, “There is a particle!” It was however, as invisible to me as the same metal usually is on the collection-plate.

One day a teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name.

Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down. It took the remainder of the class period to finish their assignment, and as the students left the room, each one handed in the papers.

That Saturday, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and listed what everyone else had said about that individual.