LOVE, EXAMPLE OF
Once on a railway train an elderly man accidentally broke a minor regulation and was unmercifully bawled out by a young train employee. Later a fellow passenger nudged the old gentleman and suggested he give the employee a piece of his mind. But the old man just smiled. “Oh,” he said, “if a man like that can stand himself for all of his life, I surely can stand him for five minutes.”804
A thirty-six-year-old mother was discovered to be in the advanced stages of terminal cancer. One doctor advised her to spend her remaining days enjoying herself on a beach in Acapulco. A second physician offered her the hope of living two to four years with the grueling side effects of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. She penned these words to her three small children:
“I’ve chosen to try to survive for you. This has some horrible costs, including pain, loss of my good humor, and moods I won’t be able to control. But I must try this, if only on the outside chance that I might live one minute longer. And that minute could be the one you might need me when no one else will do. For this I intend to struggle, tooth and nail, so help me God.” (Cited in Focus on The Family, May 1985.)805
A young lady walked into a fabric shop, went to the counter, and asked the owner for some noisy, rustling, white material. The owner found two such bolts of fabric but was rather puzzled at the young lady’s motives. Why would anyone want several yards of noisy material? Finally the owner’s curiosity got the best of him and he asked the young lady why she particularly wanted noisy cloth.
She answered: “You see, I am making a wedding gown, and my fiancé is blind. When I walk down the aisle, I want him to know when I’ve arrived at the altar, so he won’t be embarrassed.”
Such love the young woman had for her man!806
One night a two-month-old baby kept his mother and father awake with his fussing and crying. The father was at wit’s end and had lost all patience. The mother, though, in her deep maternal love, picked up her son and, cuddling him, said, “That’s all right. I’m sorry you don’t feel better!” What an object lesson in self-giving love.807
After the U.S.S. Pueblo was captured by the North Koreans, the eighty-two surviving crew members were thrown into a brutal captivity. In one particular instance thirteen of the men were required to sit in a rigid manner around a table for hours. After several hours the door was violently flung open and a North Korean guard brutally beat the man in the first chair with the butt of his rifle. The next day, as each man sat at his assigned place, again the door was thrown open and the man in the first chair was brutally beaten. On the third day it happened again to the same man. Knowing the man could not survive, another young sailor took his place. When the door was flung open the guard automatically beat the new victim senseless. For weeks, each day a new man stepped forward to sit in that horrible chair, knowing full well what would happen. At last the guards gave up in exasperation. They were unable to beat that kind of sacrificial love.808
During the season of Super Bowl I, the great quarterback Bart Starr had a little incentive scheme going with his oldest son. For every perfect paper Bart Junior brought home from school, Starr gave him ten cents. After a particularly rough game against St. Louis, in which Starr felt he had performed poorly, he returned home weary and battered, late at night after a long plane ride. But he couldn’t help feeling better when he reached his bedroom. There attached to his pillow was a note: “Dear Dad, I thought you played a great game. Love, Bart.” Taped to the note were two dimes.809