(Erik's Webhome Online)

Note : This is a place where you can read compiled stories and poetry that I find truly reveal the truth in us. This is a place where emotions are honored as god-given rights. Feel free to delve deep into your inner being and learn that there is still peace within you. Most of the master pieces below have been obtained from Chicken Soup for the Soul : Home Delivery. I would like to take this opportunity to thank a special friend who subscribed me to this free service.

Index
Stories
Love Is Stronger...
Michael
Service With A Smile
The Power of Determination

    Michael is the kind of guy you love to hate. He is always in a good mood and always has something positive to say.  When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, If I were any better, I would be twins! He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Michael was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

    Seeing this style really made me curious, so one day I went up to Michael and asked him, I don't get it! You can't be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it? Michael replied, Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Mike, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood. I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it.

    Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.

    Yeah, right, it isn't that easy, I protested. Yes, it is, Michael said. Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line is: It's your choice how you live life.

    I reflected on what Michael said. Soon thereafter, I left the tower industry to start my own business.  We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it. Several years later, I heard that Michael was involved in a serious accident, falling some 60 feet from a communications tower. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Michael was released from the hospital with rods placed in his back.

    I saw Michael about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied. If I were any better, I'd be twins.  Wanna see my scars? I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the accident took place.

    The first thing that went through my mind was the well being of my soon to be born daughter, Michael replied. Then, as I lay on the ground, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live or I could choose to die. I chose to live.

    Weren't you scared? Did you lose consciousness I asked?  Michael continued,...the paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the ER and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared.

    In their eyes, I read 'he's a dead man. I knew I needed to take action. What did you do I asked?

    Well, there was a big burly nurse shouting questions at me, said Michael. She asked if I was allergic to anything. 'Yes, I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, Gravity. Over their laughter, I told them, 'I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead'.

    Michael lived, thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

Source : Unknown

    Having a goal based on love is the greatest life insurance in the world.

    If you had asked my dad why he got up in the morning, you would have found his answer disarmingly simple: "To make my wife happy."

    Mom and Dad met when they were nine. Every day before school, they met on a park bench with the homework. Mom corrected Dad's English and he did the same with her math. Upon graduation, their teachers said that the two of them were the best "student" in the school. Note the singular!

    They took their time building their relationship, even though Dad always knew she was the girl for him. Their first kiss occurred when they were 17, and their romance continued to grow into their 80s.

    Just how much power their relationship created was brought to light in 1964. The doctor told Dad he had cancer and estimated that he had six months to one year left at the most.

    "Sorry to disagree with you, Doc," my father said. "But I'll tell you how long I have. One day longer than my wife. I love her too much to leave the planet without her."

    And so it was, to the amazement of everyone who didn't really know this love-matched pair, that Mom passed away at the age of 85 and Dad followed one year later when he was 86. Near the end, he told my brothers and me that those 17 years were the best six months he ever spent.

    To the wonderful doctors and nurses at the Department of Veterans' Affairs Medical Center at Long Beach, he was a walking miracle. They kept a loving watch on him and just couldn't understand how a body so riddled with cancer could continue to function so well.

    My dad's explanation was simple. He informed them that he had been a medic in World War I and saw amputated arms and legs, and he had noticed that none of them could think. So he decided he would tell his body how to behave. Once, as he stood up and it was evident he felt a stabbing pain, he looked down at his chest and shouted, "Shut up! We're having a party here."

    Two days before he left us he said, "Boys, I'll be with your mother very soon and someday, some place we'll all be together again. But take your time about joining us; your mother and I have a lot of catching up to do."

    It is said that love is stronger than prison walls. Dad proved it was a heck of a lot stronger than tiny cancer cells.

    Bob, George and I are still here, armed with Dad's final gift.

    A goal, a love and a dream give you total control over your body and your life.

By John Wayne Schlatter
from Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul
Copyright 1996 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Patty Aubery & Nancy Mitchell, R.N.

    Everything I learned about selling I learned in one afternoon from my father, Walt, at his furniture store in New Era, Michigan. I was 12 years old.

    I was sweeping the floor when an elderly woman entered the store. I asked Dad if I could wait on her. "Sure," he replied.

    "May I help you?"

    "Yes, young man, I bought a sofa from your store and the leg fell off. I want to know when you're going to fix it."

    "When did you purchase it, ma'am?"

    "About 10 years ago."

    I told my father that she thought we were going to fix her old sofa for free. He said to tell her we'd be there that afternoon.

    After screwing on the new leg, we left, and on the ride back Pop asked, "What's bothering you son?"

    "You know that I want to go to college. If we drive around fixing old sofas for free, we'll go broke"

    "You had to learn how to do that repair job anyway. Besides, you missed the most important part. You didn't notice the store tag when we flipped the couch over. She bought it from Sears."

    "You mean we did that job for nothing and she's not even our customer?"

    Dad looked me in the eye and said, "She is now."

    Two days later she returned to our store and bought several thousand dollars worth of new furniture from me. When we delivered it, she put a gallon jar filled with change, singles, fives, tens, twenties, fifties and hundreds on the kitchen table. "Take what you need," she said and left the room.

    I've been selling for 30 years since that day. I have had the highest closing average in every organization I have represented because I treat customers with respect.

By Michael T. Burcon
from A Cup of Chicken Soup for the Soul
Copyright 1996 by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen & Barry Spilchuk

    The little country schoolhouse was heated by an old-fashioned, pot-bellied stove. A little boy had the job of coming to school early each day to start the fire and warm the room before his teacher and his classmates arrived.

    One morning they arrived to find the schoolhouse engulfed in flames. They dragged the unconscious little boy out of the flaming building more dead than alive. He had major burns over the lower half of his body and was taken to the nearby county hospital.

    From his bed the dreadfully burned, semi-conscious little boy faintly heart the doctor talking to his mother. The doctor told his mother that her son would surely die - which was for the best, really - for the terrible fire had devastated the lower half of his body.

    But the brave boy didn't want to die. He made up his mind that he would survive. Somehow, to the amazement of the physician, he did survive. When the mortal danger was past, he again heard the doctor and his mother speaking quietly. The mother was told that since the fire had destroyed so much flesh in the lower part of his body, it would almost be better if he had died, since he was doomed to be a lifetime cripple with no use at all of his lower limbs.

    Once more the brave boy made up his mind. He would not be a cripple. He would walk. But unfortunately from the waist down, he had no motor ability. His thin legs just dangled there, all but lifeless.

    Ultimately he was released from the hospital. Every day his mother would massage his little legs, but there was no feeling, no control, nothing. Yet his determination that he would walk was as strong as ever.

    When he wasn't in bed, he was confined to a wheelchair. One sunny day his mother wheeled him out into the yard to get some fresh air. This day, instead of sitting there, he threw himself from the chair. He pulled himself across the grass, dragging his legs behind him.

    He worked his way to the white picket fence bordering their lot. With great effort, he raised himself up on the fence. Then, stake by stake, he began dragging himself along the fence, resolved that he would walk. He started to do this every day until he wore a smooth path all around the yard beside the fence. There was nothing he wanted more than to develop life in those legs.

    Ultimately through his daily massages, his iron persistence and his resolute determination, he did develop the ability to stand up, then to walk haltingly, then to walk by himself - and then - to run.

    He began to walk to school, then to run to school, to run for the sheer joy of running. Later in college he made the track team.

    Still later in Madison Square Garden this young man who was not expected to survive, who would surely never walk, who could never hope to run - this determined young man, Dr. Glenn Cunningham, ran the world's fastest mile!

By Burt Dubin
from Chicken Soup for the Soul
Copyright 1993 by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen