A pastor tells of being in a church for twelve years. He had a custom during Sunday morning service of calling the children forward just before his sermon so that they could go to a \u2018children\u2019s church\u2019 especially for them. The children would march past the pulpit and he would make it a point to smile at each of them. In return he received smiles. \u2018It was one of the high points of the service for me,\u2019 he recalled. But one day he apparently missed smiling at a child. A curly-headed four-year-old ran out of the procession and threw herself into the arms of her mother, sobbing as if her heart was broken. After the service he went to find out what happened. The mother explained to him that her child had said, \u2018I smiled at God, but he didn\u2019t smile back at me!\u2019 The pastor reflected, \u2018To that child I stood for God. I had failed with my smile, and the world went dark.\u2019 <\/p>\n
As you go through this day, commit yourself to using the smile strategy. You say, \u2018I\u2019ve got more troubles than Job, so I\u2019ve got nothing to smile about.\u2019 Job experienced more troubles in a year than most of us will experience in a lifetime. But though he was down, he lifted others. Though he was in despair, he encouraged others. How did he do it? \u2018They longed for me to speak as people long for rain\u2026 When they were discouraged, I smiled at them. My look of approval was precious to them.\u2019<\/i> (Job\u00a029:23\u201324\u00a0NLT)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A pastor tells of being in a church for twelve years. He had a custom during Sunday morning service of calling the children forward just before his sermon so that they could go to a \u2018children\u2019s church\u2019 especially for them. The children would march past the pulpit and he would make it a point to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_et_pb_use_builder":"off","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1633\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ucbmedia.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}