One morning, a blind (瞎的) boy sat on the steps of building with a hat by his feet. He held a sign which said, “I am blind, please help me.”

There were only a few coins in the hat. A man was walking by. He took out a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words on it. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by could see the new words.

Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy. That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, “Are you the one who changed my sign in the morning? What did you write?” The man said, “I only wrote the truth. I said what you said, but in a different way.”

What he wrote was, “________”

Do you think the first sign and second sign were saying the same thing?

Of course both signs told people the boy was blind. But the first sign simply told people to help by putting some money in the hat. The second sign told people that they were able to enjoy the beauty of the day, but the boy could not enjoy it because he was blind.

The first sign simply said the boy was blind, while the second sign told people they were so lucky that they were not blind.

There are at least two lessons we can learn from this simple story.

The first is: Treasure (珍惜) what you have. Someone else has less. Try your best to help those who need your help.

The second is: Be creative. Think differently. There is always a better way.

I was on my way to visit my sister, Mandi, who was badly ill in hospital.

It was winter. The once colorful leaves had all fallen from the trees, leaving them black and bare. Just like what Mandi was going through, the joyful things in her life were dropping away one by one.

“Are we almost there, grandma?”

I’d nearly forgotten my young granddaughter was in the car with me. She’d been sitting quietly in her car seat, watching the scenery go by.

I needed to focus on something more positive, at least for her sake. “Thank you, God, for this beautiful day,” I said, trying to sound cheerful. Calling it beautiful was a stretch but at least it wasn’t raining.

“I see a pretty blue sky,” Jocelyn said. “And the yellow sun. And the chocolate trees!”

“Chocolate trees?”

“Yes,” Jocelyn said. She seemed surprised I didn’t know exactly what she meant. “When the trees don’t have their leaves on them, they look like chocolate.”

Chocolate? I thought. Well, she’s not wrong. They are deep brown, like dark chocolate.

I was still thinking about those trees when we got to Mandi’s, so I told her about it as soon as we walked in the door.

“I love that!” Mandi said, a glimmer of light in her eyes. She looked at the trees outside the window, “I used to see something bare and ugly out there, but our Jocelyn sees chocolate trees. We should all be like that, shouldn’t we? We should learn to look for the chocolate.”

A．	B．
C．	D．

When I was 22 years old, I experienced a neighbor’s deep and warm heart. I had been home from college since December, and was feeling seriously upset and “lost”.

By summertime my mother’s neighbor, a woman everyone knew and liked, came to the house and invited me to tea at her home that evening. She was British and made English tea for me. Then she looked very warmly at me and shared her story—her pain and sadness of losing her husband—over that cup of tea. She knew more than anyone that I needed to make a plan about how to go forward! We finally finished at 2:00 a.m. ! What an unforgettable cup of tea!

When I was 26 years old, I’d completed a degree, and was working in New York City.

One evening, a family invited me to enjoy a cup of tea and talk. As I was led by the couple to their living room, the young wife went to the kitchen to make tea with warm milk! When it was served it was the perfect thing I’d ever drunk. What a cup of tea—so much full-hearted love served with it!

When I was 38 years old, I was teaching English in Japan. One young woman wanted to say “thank you” in a special way when her lessons were completed.

On the day of her last lesson, she brought her Japanese “tea set”. She quietly knelt (跪) at my coffee table and made me a cup of tea in the Japanese way. Then she silently held it out to me to drink with both hands, smiling sweetly. I was surprised at the beauty of her gift and her kind heart, because it was so much more than a cup of tea!