other hand, began to imply something slickly unrealistic or
laughably fake and was often pronounced with a sneer.
At length, having rediscovered the amorous appeal of their
distinctives like freckles and missing buttons and the inability to
refold road maps, the humans began to marry each other again. It
wasn't many years before a young pledge of one of these new
relationships was heard to ask in a tone of frustration, "But Mommy,
why must I have a crooked tooth?" To which the mother replied,
"That's so I'll always remember how truly beautiful you really are."
The Caterpillar and the Bee
A bee, flying proudly around the garden, approached a caterpillar
sitting on a shrub. "I don't know how you can stand to be alive,"
the bee said. "I'm valuable to the world with my honey and wax, I
can fly anywhere I want, and I'm beautiful to behold. But you're
just an ugly worm, not good for anything. While I soar from bloom
to bloom feasting on nectar, all you can do is creep around and
chew on a stem."
"What you say may be true," replied the caterpillar, "but my
Maker must have put me here for some purpose, so I trust him
for my future."
"You have no future," said the bee. "You'll be crawling through the
dirt for the rest of your life. If you ask me, you'd be better off
choking on a leaf."
Sometime later the flowers in the garden woke to find that the bee
and the caterpillar had both disappeared. All that they could see
now was a shriveled yellow body hanging from the edge of a spider
web and a magnificent butterfly flexing its wings in the sun.
* This story reminds us that we cannot predict the future, either
for others or for ourselves.
*This story teaches us to trust in God rather than in the opinion
of men.
The Wise One
High in the mountains of a distant land there once lived a man so
incredibly old that his life no longer had any plot. He was so old
that his very name had faded from the memories of all those around
him, and he was known only as "The Wise One." He spent his later
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