THIS IS A TRUE STORY A MAN TOLD ABOUT HIS TEENAGE YEARS. He was listening to the radio one day when his father came in from working outside. His dad looked at him and said, “Son, in 24 hours you won’t even remember what you’re listening to now. How about doing something for the next 20 minutes that you’ll remember for the next 20 years? I promise you’ll enjoy it every time you thing of it.”

“What is it?” the son asked. His dad said, “Well, our neighbor, Mrs. Brown, needs her grass cut. Why don’t you go cut her lawn while she’s gone, and then get back quickly so she won’t know you are the person who did it?”

The son said he hurried over and cut their neighbor’s grass in just 20 minutes. Mrs. Brown came home later and never knew who had mowed her lawn for her.

That son said his father was right. It’s now more than 20 years later, and every time he thinks of secretly cutting Mrs. Brown’s grass for her, he really enjoys the memory.

We shouldn’t tell people that we did or how much we gave. We know it, God knows it, and that’s all the reward we need. The reward that humans give cannot ever match the reward God gives. So if all we want is the approval of other people, then that’s all we’ll get. But if we give our help and service secretly, for God and others, then we’ll be rewarded and blessed much more during this life, and beyond.  ---  Alec W. Hersch

“Be careful not to do your ‘acts of righteousness’ before men, to be seen by them. If you do, you will have no reward from your Father in Heaven. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” MATTHEW 6:1, 3-4 NIV

YOU WILL FIND AS YOU LOOK BACK THAT THE MOMENTS THAT STAND OUR, the moments when you have really lived, are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love. As memory scans the past, there leap forward those hours when you have been able to do unnoticed kindnesses to those round about you, things too trifling to speak about, but which you feel have entered into your eternal life. I have enjoyed almost every pleasure planned for man, and yet as I look back I see standing our, four or five short experiences when the love of God reflected itself in some small act of love of mine, and these seem to be the things which abide. Everything else is transitory. But the acts of love which no man knows about, or can ever know about they never fail. ---  Unknown

HE IS A CHRISTIAN WHO TRIES TO BE THE KIND OF NEIGHBOR CHRIST WOULD BE, and the kind of citizen Christ would be, and who asks himself in all the choices of his business life, and his social life, and his personal life, ‘What would the Master do in this case?’  ---  George Hodges (adapted)