He was in the first grade class I taught at Saint Mary’s School in Morris, Minn. All 34 of my students were dear to me, but Mark Eklund was one in a million. Very neat in appearance, but had that happy-to-be-alive attitude that made even his occasional mischievousness delightful.
  Mark talked incessantly. I had to remind him again and again that talking without permission was not acceptable. What impressed me so much, though, was his sincere response every time I had to correct him for misbehaving – “Thank you for correcting me, Sister!” I didn’t know what to make of it at first, but before long I became accustomed to hearing it many times a day.
  One morning my patience was growing thin when Mark talked once too often, and then I made a novice teacher’s mistake. I looked at Mark and said, “If you say one more word, I am going to tape your mouth shut!” It wasn’t ten seconds later when Chuck blurted out, “Mark is talking again.”
  I hadn’t asked any of the students to help me watch Mark, but since I had stated the punishment in front of the class, I had to act on it. I remember the scene as if it had occurred this morning. I walked to my desk, deliberately opened my drawer and took out a roll of masking tape. Without saying a word, I proceeded to Mark’s desk, tore off two pieces of tape and made a big X with them over his mouth. I then returned to the front of the room.
  As I glanced a Mark to see how he was doing, he winked at me. That did it! I started laughing. The class cheered as I walked back to Mark’s desk, removed the tape, and shrugged my shoulders. His first words were, “Thank you for correcting me, Sister.”
  At the end of the year, I was asked to teach junior-high math. The years flew by, and before I knew it Mark was in my classroom again.
  He was more handsome that ever and just as polite. Since he had to listen carefully to my instruction in the “new math,” he did not talk as much in ninth grade as he had in third.
  One Friday, things just didn’t feel right. We had worked hard on a new concept all week and I sensed that the students were frowning, frustrated with themselves and edgy with one another.
  I had to stop this crankiness before it got out of hand. So I asked them to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name. Then I 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 me the papers. Charlie smiled. Mark said, “Thank you for teaching me, Sister. Have a good weekend.”
  That Saturday, I wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and I listed what everyone else had said about that individual. On Monday I gave each student his or her list. Before long, the entire class was smiling. “Really?” I heard whispered. “ I never knew that meant anything to anyone!” “I didn’t know others liked me so much.” No one ever mentioned those papers in class again. I never knew if the discussed them after class of with their parents, but it didn’t matter. The exercise had accomplished its purpose. The students were happy with themselves and one another again.
  That group of students moved on. Several years later, after I returned from vacation, my parents met me at the airport. As we were driving home, Mother asked me the usual questions about the trip – the weather, my experiences in general. There was a lull in the conversation. Mother gave Dad a sideways glance and simply said, “Dad?”
  My father cleared his throat as he usually did before something important. “The Eklunds called last night,” he began. “Really?” I said. “I haven’t heard from them in years. I wonder how Mark is.”
  Dad responded quietly. “Mark was killed in Vietnam,” he said. "The funeral is tomorrow, and his parents would like it if you could attend.”
  To this day I can still point to the exact spot on I-494 where Dad told me about Mark. I had never seen a serviceman in a military coffin before. Mark looked so handsome, so mature. All I could think at that moment was, “Mark, I would give all the masking tape in the world if only you would talk to me.”
  The church was packed with Mark’s friends. Chuck’s sister sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
  Why did it have to rain on the day of the funeral? It was difficult enough at the graveside. The pastor said the usual prayers, and the bugler played tapes. One by one those who loved Mark took a last walk by the coffin and sprinkled it with holy water. I was the last one to bless the coffin. As I stood there, one of the soldiers who acted as a pallbearer came up to me.
“Were you Mark’s math teacher?” he asked, I nodded as I continued to stare at the coffin. “Mark talked about you a lot,” he said.
  After the funeral, most of Mark’s former classmates headed to Chuck’s farmhouse for lunch. Mark’s mother and father were there, obviously waiting for me. “We want to show you something,” his father said, taking a wallet out of his pocket.   “They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it.”
  Opening the billfold, he carefully removed two warn pieces of notebook paper that had obviously been taped, folded and refolded many times. I knew without looking that the papers were the ones on which I had listed all the good things each of Mark’s classmates had said about him. “Thank you so much for doing that,” Mark’s mother said. “As you can see, Mark treasured it.”
  Mark’s classmates sheepishly said, “I still have my list. It’s in the top drawer of my desk at home.” Chuck’s wife said, “Chuck asked me to put his in our wedding album.” “I have mine too,” Marilyn said. “It’s in my diary.”
  Then Vicki, another classmate, reached into her pocketbook, took out her wallet and showed her worn and frazzled list to the group. “I carry this with me at all times,” Vicki said without batting an eyelash. “I think we all saved our list.” That’s when I finally sat down and cried. I cried for Mark and for all his friends who would never see him again.
  The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don’t know when that one day will be. So please, tell the people you love and care for, that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.

  John Powell, A Professor at Loyola University in Chicago writes about a student in his theology of Faith class named Tommy:
  Some twelve years ago, I stood watching my university students’ file into the classroom for our first session in the Theology of Faith. That was the first day I first saw Tommy.
  My eyes and my mind both blinked. He was combing his long flaxen hair, which hung six inches below his shoulders. It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with hair that long. I guess it was just coming into fashion then. I know in my mind that it isn’t what’s on your head but what’s in it that counts; but on that day I was unprepared and my emotions flipped. I immediately filed Tommy under “S” for strange…very strange.
Tommy turned out to be the “atheist in residence” in my Theology of Faith course. He constantly objected to, smirked at, or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving Father-God. We lived with each other in relative peace for one semester, although I admit he was for me at times a serious pain the back pew.
  When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam, he asked in a slightly cynical tone: “Do you think I’ll ever find God?”
  I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. “No!” I said very emphatically.
“Oh,” he responded, “I thought that was the product you were publishing.”
  I let him get five steps from the classroom door and then called out: “Tommy! I don’t think you’ll ever find him, but I am absolutely certain that he will find you!”
  He shrugged a little and left my class and my life. I felt slightly disappointed at the thought that he had missed my clever line: “He will find you!” At least I thought it was clever.
  Later I heard that Tommy had graduated and I was duly grateful. Then a sad report, I heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out, he came to see me.
When he walked into my office, his body was very badly wasted, and the long hair had all fallen out as a result of chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm, for the first time, I believe.
  “Tommy, I’ve thought about you so often. I hear you are sick!” I blurted out.
  “Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It’s a matter of weeks.”
  “Can you talk about it, Tom?”
  “Sure, what would you like to know?” “What’s it like to be only twenty-four and dying?”
  “We’ll it could be worse.”
  “Like what?”
  “Well, like being fifty and having no values or ideals. Like being fifty and thinking that booze, seducing women, and making money are the real ‘biggies’ in life.”
  I began to look through my mental file cabinet under “S” where I had filed Tommy as strange. (It seems as though everybody I try to reject by classification God sends back into my life to educate me.)
  “But what I really came to see you about,” Tom said, “is something you said to me the last day of class.” (He remembered!) He continued, “ I asked you if you thought I would ever find God, and you said, ‘No!’ which surprised me. Then you said, ‘but he will find you.’ I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time. (My “Clever” line. He thought about that a lot!)
  But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, then I got serious about locating God. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven. But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened.
  Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and with no success? You get psychologically gutted, fed up with trying. And the you quit.” “Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may be or may not be there, I just quit. I decided that I didn’t really care…about God, about an afterlife, or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable. I thought about you and you class and I remembered something else you had said: ‘the essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you had loved them.”
  “So I began with the hardest one: My dad. He was reading the newspaper when I approached him.” “Dad.”
  “Yes, what?” he asked without lowering the newspaper.
  “Dad, I would like to talk with you.”
  “Well, talk.”
  “I mean… It’s really important.”
  The newspaper came down three slow inches. “What is it?”
  “Dad, I love you. I just wanted you to know that.”
  Tom smiled at me and said with obvious satisfaction, as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside of him: “The newspaper fluttered to the floor. Then my father did two things I could never remember him ever doing before. He cried and hugged me. And we talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning. It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears, to feel his hug, to hear him say that he loved me.”
  “It was easier with my mother and little brother. They cried with me, too, and we hugged each other, and started saying real nice things to each other. We shared the things we had been keeping secret for so many years. I was only sorry about one thing: that I had waited so long. Here I was just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.”
  “Then, one day I turned around and God was there. He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with him. I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop, ‘C’mon, jump through. ‘C’mon, I’ll give you three days…three weeks.’ Apparently God does things in his own way and at his own hour.” “But the important thing is that he was there. He found me. You were right. He found me even after I stopped looking for him.”
  “Tommy,” I practically gasped, “I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize. To me, at least, you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make him a private possession, a problem solver, or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening love, You know, the Apostle John said that. He said, “God is love, and anyone who lives in love is living with God, and God is living in him.”
  “Tom, could I ask you a favor? You know, when I had you in class you were a real pain. But (laughingly) you can make it all up to me now. Would you come into my present Theology of Faith course and tell them what you have just told me? If I told them the same thing it wouldn’t be half as effective as if you were telling them.”
  “Oooh…I was ready for you, but I don’t know if I’m ready for your class.”
  “Tom, think about it. If and when you are ready, give me a call.”
  In a few days Tommy called, said he was ready for the class, that he wanted to do that for God and for me. So we scheduled a date. However, he never made it. He had another appointment, far more important than the one with me and my class. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed. He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of man has ever seen or the ear of man has ever heard, or the mind of man had ever imagined.
  Before he died, we talked one last time. “I’m not going to make it to your class,” he said.
  “I know Tom.”
  “Will you tell them for me? Will you… tell the whole world for me?”
  “I will, Tom. I’ll tell them. I’ll do my best.” So, to all of you who have been kind enough to hear this simple statement about love, thank you for listening. And to you, Tommy, somewhere in the sunlit, verdant hills of heaven: “I told them, Tommy…as best I could.”

  In the 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 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?” Shaya’s father knew that his son was not at all athletic and that most boys would not want him on their team. But Shaya’s father approached one of the boys in the field and asked if Shaya could play.
  The boy looked around for guidance from his teammates. Getting none, he took matters into his own hands and said, “We are losing by six runs and the game is in the eighth inning. I guess he can be on our team and we’ll try to put him up to bat in the ninth inning.”
  Shaya’s father was ecstatic as Shaya smiled broadly. Shaya was told to put on a glove and go out to play short center field. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Shaya’s team scored a few runs but was still behind by three. In the bottom of the ninth inning, Shaya’s team scored again and now with two outs and the bases loaded with the potential winning run on base, Shaya was scheduled to be up. Would the team actually let Shaya bat at this juncture and give away their chance to win the game?
  Surprisingly, Shaya was given the bat. Everyone knew that it was all but impossible because Shaya didn’t even know how to hold the bat properly, let alone hit with it. However as Shaya stepped up to the plate, the pitcher moved a few steps to lob the ball in softly so Shaya should at least be able to make contact. The first pitch came in and Shaya swung clumsily and missed. One of Shaya’s teammates came up to Shaya and together they held the bat and faced the pitcher waiting for the next pitch. The pitcher again took a few steps forward to toss the ball softly toward Shaya. As the pitch came in, Shaya and his teammate swung at the bat and together they hit a slow ground ball to the pitcher.
  The pitcher picked up the soft grounder and could easily have thrown the ball to the first baseman. Shaya would have been out and that would have ended the game. Instead, the pitcher took the ball and threw it on a high arc to right field, far beyond reach of the first baseman. Everyone started yelling “Shaya, run to first. Run to first.” Never in his life had Shaya run to first. He scampered down the baseline wide-eyed and startled.
  By the time he reached first base, the right fielder had the ball. He could have thrown the ball to the second baseman who would tag out Shaya, who was still running. But the right fielder understood what the pitcher’s intentions were, so he threw the ball high and far over the third baseman’s head. Everyone yelled, “Run to second, run to second.”
  Shaya ran towards second base as the runners ahead of him deliriously circled the bases towards home. As Shaya reached second base, the opposing short stop ran to him, turned him in the direction of the third base and shouted “Run to third.” As Shaya rounded third, the boys from both teams ran behind him screaming, “Shaya run home.” Shaya ran home, stepped on home plate and all 18 boys lifted him on their shoulders and made him the hero, as he had just hit a “grand slam” and won the game for his team.
  “That day,” Said the father softly with tears now rolling sown his face, “Those 18 boys reached their level of God’s perfection.”
  Funny how this is so true and shame on us! Funny how simple it is for people to trash God then wonder why the world is going to hell. Funny how we believe what the newspapers say, but question what the Bible says. Or is it scary?
  Funny how someone can say “I believe in God” but still follow Satan (who by the way, also “believes” in God) and they spread like wildfire, but when you start sending messages regarding the Lord, people think twice about sharing.
  Funny how the lewd, crude, vulgar and obscene pass freely through cyberspace, but the public discussion of Jesus is suppressed in the school and workplace. Funny isn’t it?
  Funny how someone can be so fired up for Christ on Sunday, but be an invisible Christian the rest of the week. Are you laughing?
  Funny how when you go to forward this message, you will not send it to many on your address list because you’re not sure what they believe, or what they will think of you for sending it to them.
  Funny how I can be more worried about what other people think of me than what God thinks of me.