Integrity

Here's a funny / sweet story from my week at the primary school. 

First, the funny part: An adorable Dennis the Menace-type kindergartner whom I've written about before finally earned student of the week honors, which he has DILIGENTLY been striving to do. This occurred at the end of last week. Well, because of his honor, this little boy got to stand up and share a poster of his life with the class on Monday. As he finished his turn in the limelight, he said to the class, "Raise your hand if you love Jesus." According to his teacher, everybody raised their hand. Continuing, the child said, "Well I'm glad, because if you love Jesus you'll go to heaven, and if you don't, you'll go to..." At this point, another boy finished his sentence..."You'll go to the worst place on earth." In a nervous dither to contain the situation, the teacher said, "And that place is not on earth. Now let's go to gym!"

Now for the sweet part: Every morning, I go in to check on this little boy. His teacher gives him a behavior rating from 1 to 10 based on the previous day's behavior, and the child colors in that many boxes on a bar graph, which I call a rainbow chart. Well, he has been doing a wonderful job using self-control recently and has been earning lots of 10's. This morning, his teacher said, "Miss Mimi, it's another 10. He did an awesome job yesterday!" Congratulating the child and telling him to color in 10 squares, I started chit-chatting with his teacher. A minute later, I went to collect the rainbow chart. To my surprise, the little boy had only colored 5 boxes. I said, "You still have 5 more to color, Sweetie." With a solemn expression on his face, this honest little child looked up at me with his big brown eyes, shook his head, and said, "But I got a sad face." After checking with his teacher, I discovered that yes, he had gotten in trouble and received a bad note to take home at some point during the day. This occurrence had slipped the teacher's mind when she said he'd earned a 10. As the teacher and I went into her office with this precious little boy and told him how much his trustworthiness meant to us, we both had tears in our eyes. Then I said, based on the "preaching" he'd done in his class on Monday, "You said you loved Jesus, and it must be true because you're acting just like He'd want you to!"

I just LOVE these stories, and I'll never forget the year of meaningful experiences I've had with this little imp!