Spiritual Spinach

There is a wonderful story about a family with one house rule that always was strictly enforced: everyone’s plate had to be cleaned at every meal, without question or discussion of any kind. And the rule included vegetables. At first, the children griped a lot, but soon they fell in the spirit of the rule and eating every morsel on the plate became almost automatic to them. Moreover, the rule began to pay great dividends for the children after a sign was posted in the school lunch-room. It read: “No dessert until you show your empty plate.” The children of that family had no problem with that lunch-room edict, and the eleven-year-old even found a way in which to turn it into a fantastic enterprise. This was revealed when his father stumbled onto a cigar box loaded with $38 in small change tucked away in the boy’s bedroom closet. The parent had no notion of how his eleven-year-old son had come into such a sum.…