Posts

Showing posts from September, 2015

THE PERFECTIONIST SCULPTOR

Image
A gentleman once visited a temple under construction where  he saw a sculptor making an idol of God. Suddenly he noticed a similar idol lying nearby.  Surprised,  he asked the sculptor,  “Do you need two statues of the same idol?” “No,” said the sculptor without looking up,  “We need only one, but the first one got damaged at the last stage.” The gentleman examined the idol and found no apparent damage.  “Where is the damage?”   he asked. “There is a scratch on the nose of the idol.” said the sculptor, still busy with his work. “Where are you going to install the idol?” The sculptor replied that it would be installed on a pillar twenty feet high. “If the idol is that far, who is going to know that there is a scratch on the nose?” the gentleman asked. The sculptor stopped his work, looked up at the gentleman, smiled and said, “I know it and God knows it!” The desire to excel should be exclusive of the fact whether someone appreciates it or not.  Excellence is

THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE

Image
A giant ship engine failed. The ship’s owners tried one expert after another, but none of them could figure but how to fix the engine. Then they brought in an old man who had been fixing ships since he was a young.  He carried a large bag of tools with him, and when he arrived, he immediately went to work. He inspected the engine very carefully, top to bottom.  Two of the ship’s owners were there, watching this man, hoping he would know what to do.  After looking things over, the old man reached into his bag and pulled out a small hammer. He gently tapped something.  Instantly, the engine lurched into life. He carefully put his hammer away. The engine was fixed!  A week later, the owners received a bill from the old man for ten thousand dollars.  “What?!” the owners exclaimed. “He hardly did anything!”  So they wrote the old man a note saying, “Please send us an itemized bill.” The man sent a bill that read:  Tapping with a hammer…… …… ……… $ 2.00  Knowing where to tap……… …… ……… $ 9,9

WHO IS PACKING YOUR PARACHUTE?

Image
Charles Plumb was a US Navy jet pilot in Vietnam. After 75 combat missions, his plane was destroyed by a surface-to-air missile. Plumb ejected and parachuted into enemy hands. He was captured and spent 6 years in a communist Vietnamese prison. He survived the ordeal and now lectures on lessons learned from that experience. One day, when Plumb and his wife were sitting in a restaurant, a man at another table came up and said, “You’re Plumb! You flew jet fighters in Vietnam from the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk. You were shot down!” “How in the world did you know that?” asked Plumb .  “I packed your parachute,” the man replied. Plumb gasped in surprise and gratitude. The man pumped his hand and said, “I guess it worked!” Plumb assured him, “It sure did. If your chute hadn’t worked, I wouldn’t be here today.” Plumb couldn’t sleep that night, thinking about that man. Plumb says, “I kept wondering what he might have looked like in a Navy uniform: a white hat, a bib in the back, and bell-

ARMS AND LEGS FOR OTHERS

Image
Bob Butler lost his legs in a 1965 land mine explosion in Vietnam. He returned home a war hero. Twenty years later, he proved once again that heroism comes from the heart. Butler was working in his garage in a small town in Arizona, USA on a hot summer day; when he heard a woman’s screams coming from a nearby house. He began rolling his wheelchair toward the house but the dense shrubbery wouldn’t allow him access to the back door. So he got out of his chair and started to crawl through the dirt and bushes. “I had to get there”, he says. “It didn’t matter how much it hurt”. When Butler arrived at the pool there was a three-year-old girl named Stephanie Hanes lying at the bottom. She had been born without arms and had fallen in the water and couldn’t swim. Her mother stood over her baby screaming frantically. Butler dove to the bottom of the pool and brought little Stephanie up to the deck. Her face was blue, she had no pulse and was not breathing.  “ Butler immediately went to work