I love this story. It begins with a nine-year-old boy sitting at a desk in a third-grade classroom. Suddenly, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened to him.

It never happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they’ll never speak to him again all long as he lives.

The boy believes his heart is going to stop, he puts his head down and prays this prayer, “Dear God, this is an emergency. I need help now! Five minutes from now I am dead meat.” He looked up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered.

As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with water. Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy’s lap. The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while he is saying to himself, “Thank you Lord. Thank you, Lord!”

Now suddenly, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to wear while his pants dry. All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk.

As life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his was transferred to someone else, Susie! She tries to help, but they tell her to get out. “You’ve done enough, you klutz.”

Finally at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?” And Susie whispers back ,“I wet my pants once too.”

Now, that is practical, timely love. I. Cor. 13:4 tells us that love is kind. Proverbs 10:12 and James 5:20 both talk about how love covers a multitude of sins. With those injunctions, we all ought to be actively looking for someone that needs our practical, timely, kind love.

It might be a homeless person, or a haggard young mother that needs a break. It might be some senior citizens that need help moving furniture or putting the Christmas tree away. It might be a teen that seriously needs a mentor or someone languishing in a lonely hospital room.

Let’s reach out as we all remember…we wet our pants once too!