A happy heart makes the face cheerful, but heartache crushes the spirit. Proverbs 15:13
John and Nathan are two best friends came back from their schools to see their old teacher at his house. He had invited them to reward them with different gifts. They both were looking very happy and cheerful. They spoke well to everybody, they helped every needy on the way to their teacher’s house. The expectation of receiving gifts made them happy and joyous. Finally when they reached, their teacher asked them to sit down and wait. The teacher came with two packets and handed them their respective gifts. They expressed their gratitude and started opening their packs. John found an expensive watch inside his packet and Nathan found a canvas, and all different colours of crayons, water colours etc. Nathan was a great painter but he was unhappy and looked gloomy.
I have seen many faces changing colours from white-happiness to red-anger, yellow-panicky, and black-gloomy. I have even seen faces changing from yellow, red, and black to white. But holding a cheerful or white face is not always easy. We need practice to keep our heart happy, to make our face cheerful.
In my life I hate to stay gloomy, grumpy, angry… I have always tried to stay happy and cheerful. Only a satisfied heart or a heart of contentment can make our face cheerful/glow. When we are discontent about certain things we feel the poke/ache. Then we feel our spirit crushing with no-enthusiasm, disinterest etc.
Even if Nathan couldn’t have bought the painting materials by himself as he was not financially that well to do, but still he was sad because he was discontented about the gift he got from his teacher. His eyes were greedy for his friend’s gift – an expensive watch.
How many times we do compare our gifts, blessings with others and feel sad?
Let’s learn to stay happy and content… then only we can have a cheerful face, otherwise our discontentment/heartache will keep crushing our spirits everyday, every moment.
Stay Blessed!
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Once I bought something for a someone special, it was his first day of job in a very reputed company, he had bought a new wardrobe, ties, shirts, shoes, accessories, etc. , and I decided he needed something to complete the look. On the morning he got dressed meticulously, wearing crisp and ironed shirts, pleated trousers, making that perfect tie knot, polished shiny shoes, all accessories in place, and my heart did a somersault to see him look like a gentleman, but something lacked. I presented him with the small box, I had bought them from eBay, a pair of cuff links, smooth, cabochon cut, the satellite stones set into a sleek, beautiful, natural colour variation framed by a textured surround, sterling silver from Harrods of London for 300 Pounds. His eyes lit up as he opened the box and as he saw what was inside, his face fell, he looked at me with a helpless look and returned me the box saying he won’t take such a costly gift from me, I looked up at his face in surprise, feeling rejected and insisted that he can’t say no to my gift of love, but he wouldn’t accept them and kept them back in my bag, tears of hurt rolled down my face, and he wiped them with the back of his hand. “I want something from you, I demand it, but it should be yours, it shouldn’t be Mohamed Al-Fayed’s”, his comment made me laugh, and I nodded understanding his point. I took a pen from my purse, a simple Uniball pen, but it was my lucky pen, I had kept it with me forever, given all exams from that one pen and gave it to him, he took it, kissed it, and tucked it in his pocket. “This you are never getting back, come what may”, he told me with a smile, and my heart warmed up, and this time another kind of tear rolled down my eyes as I looked up at him, the pen sat in his breast pocket proudly and looked perfect there, he looked complete.
Quill & Parchment 