1.
The story of the angry
letter
One day a minister was very angry with his personal assistant She had
sent a letter to the wrong person, causing him not only a lot of embarrassment
but if the other person acts badly, it could cost him a lot of money too. He
was very upset.
It was the beginning of a weekend, and she was planning to take leave after
the weekend. That was in the time before emails or text messages were available.
So, he wrote her a letter. His letter contained the most hateful words and was
written in a very harsh way. Then he asked his wife to post the letter
At night he could not sleep and kept turning around in his bed. His wife
asked him what was bothering him. He felt very uneasy about the harshness he
had used in the letter and was now worried that it would hurt his PA so badly
that she may decide to quit, which would be extremely inconvenient to him. He
really regretted to be so angry in the letter.
His wise wife reassured him that she knew he would regret and that she
had not yet posted the letter.
Lesson:
if we are angry, we lose temporary our capability to think clearly. We tend to
say or write words that we clearly will regret later on, but once out there it
is almost impossible to take them back. Better to cool down first, regain our
common sense and only then we address the issue in a calm and cool way.
2. 2. The story of the boiling
water
One a day a teenage girl came back from school stating very adamantly to
her mother that she will quit school. She had failed test, had been bullied and
was very frustrated. The mom said nothing but took three pots, filled them with
water and put them on the fire until the water boiled. In one pot, she put a
carrot, in the other an egg, and in the last one coffee beans.
After half an hour, she called the girl. See, these three things were
exposed to the same stress but each responded in a different way: the carrot
was hard but became weak, the egg was soft and liquid but became hard and the
coffee beans, they just changed the surrounding into a lovely brew of coffee
giving an amazing aroma.
Lesson:
if we face difficulties or stress, we can either become weak and easily give
up, we can become hardened and lose our normal emotional response to things, or
we can try to change the situation and turn it around into something beautiful.
3.
3. The story of the nurse
who was not let in
About ten years ago,
we started a home-based nursing service for terminally ill patients. During one
of the debriefing sessions, a nurse told about the frustration she had
experienced when she visited a family with a person who was in dire need of
palliative care but she was not welcomed to deliver this care. The family was
very strongly believing in traditional healing methods and thought she was just
sent by the hospital to deliver more painful treatments to the patient. She
talked nicely to the family expressed her sincere intentions and gradually she
was allowed to take care of the bed sores of the patient and in the end her
work was very much appreciated by the family.
When asked how she had
achieved this remarkable success, she mentioned that she got the motivation
from the knowledge that this work she was doing was blessed by our Creator. She
was confident that our Creator would show the way to her and the family if it
was meant to be that she should alleviate the suffering of the patient.
Lesson: I think this is an
amazing story of courage and faith. She could have gotten discouraged and may
have considered quitting the job if the patients refuse her care. That would
have been like the carrot, getting weak. She might have hardened up and become
angry with the family, creating a situation more problematic still for the
suffering family, perhaps creating feelings of guilt. But she took the
coffee-bean approach. Through her faith in our Creator, she persisted gently
and managed to turn the stressful situation into a beautiful one.