Come with me to a third grade classroom..... There is
a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a
sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the
front of his pants are wet. He thinks his
heart is
going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how
this has happened. It's never happened before, and he
knows that when the boys find out he will never hear
the end of it. When the girls find out, they'll never
speak to him again as long as he lives.
The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he
puts his head down and prays this prayer, "Dear God, this
is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from
now I'm dead meat."
He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher
with a look in her eyes that says he has been
discovered.
As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate
named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled
with water. Susie trips in front of the teacher and
inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy's lap.
The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is
saying to himself, "Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!"
Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of
ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The
teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts
to put on while his pants dry out. All the other
children are on their hands and knees cleaning up
around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as
life would have it, the ridicule that should have been
his as been transferred to someone else - Susie.
She tries to help, but they tell her to get out.
You've done enough, you klutz!"
Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting
for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers,
"You did that on purpose, didn't you?" Susie whispers
back, "I wet my pants
once too."
