Sitting at the window of her convent, Sister Barbara opened a letter from home one evening. Inside was a $100 bill her parents had sent. Sister Barbara smiled at the gesture.
As she read the letter by the window, she noticed a shabbily dressed stranger leaning against the lamp post below.
Quickly, she wrote, "Don't despair. - Sister Barbara," on a piece of paper, wrapped the $100 bill in it, got the man's attention, and tossed it out the window to him.
The stranger picked it up, and with a puzzled expression and a tip of his hat, went off down the street.
The next day, Sister Barbara was told that a man was at the Convent door, insisting on seeing her.
She went down and found the stranger waiting. Without a word, he handed her a huge wad of $100 bills.
"What's this?", she asked.
"That's the $8,000 you have coming Sister," he replied.
"Don't Despair paid 80-to-1."
"A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity, an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty” ---Sir Winston Churchill "Political extremism involves two prime ingredients: an excessively simple diagnosis of the world's ills, and a conviction that there are identifiable villains back of it all." ---John W. Gardner “You can’t go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” ---C. S. Lewis