The Prayer That The God Hears

A Spanish missionary was visiting an island when he came across three Aztec priests.

“How do you pray?”, asked the priest.

“We have only one prayer", answered one of the Aztecs, “We say: God, You are three, we are three. Have mercy on us.”

“Beautiful prayer,” said the missionary. “But it is not exactly the prayer that God hears. I shall teach you a much better one.”

The priest taught them a Catholic prayer and went on his way to spread the Gospel among others. Years later, on the ship taking him back to Spain, he stopped at that island once more. From the deck, he saw the three holy men on the beach and waved farewell to them. At that moment the three began to walk on the water towards him.

“Father! Father!” shouted one of them, approaching the ship. “Teach us again the prayer that God hears, because we can’t remember it!”

“It doesn’t matter,” said the missionary, seeing the miracle. And he asked God to forgive him for not understanding before that He understood all the prayers.

-By Paulo Coelho

The Sick Stag

Once a stag got sick. He could barely move. Out of compassion, all of his friends came to see him. Each one of them ate some food in the stag's house. In few days, the stag starved to death.

-Based on Aesop's Fable

Just One More Night

At the age of twelve, Milton Erickson was a victim of polio. Ten months after he contracted the disease, he heard a doctor tell his parents, “your son won’t live through the night.”

Erickson heard his mother crying. 

“Maybe she won’t suffer so much if I get through tonight,” he thought to himself. And he decided not to sleep till dawn.

In the morning he shouted out, “Hey mother! I’m still alive!”

There was so much joy in the house that from then on he resolved to resist always one more night in order to postpone his parents’ suffering.

He died at the age of 75, leaving behind a series of important books on the enormous capacity that man has to overcome his own limitations.

-By Paulo Coelho