Friends am posting this story which I recd some time back. Hope you like it!!

Rgds

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    Miss Evans couldn't take being a Sunday school teacher

any longer.  Not for another Sunday!  This handful of

disrespectful teenagers snapped their gum during prayer

time and read magazines during Bible study.  But most awful

of all, at prayer request they asked the Lord to increase

their weekly allowances!

     "I have had it with you.  I quit!"  she screamed at

the students.

     "Cool," Nick said nodding in approval.  He was the

rudest kid she'd ever met.

     It took two months to find a new replacement for that

Sunday school class.  The pastor escorted Miss Betty Ray in

to meet the pseudo-angelic-looking group.  New in town, she

hadn't heard of their reputation for chasing off teachers.

By the look of her pink dress, one size too small, and her

bad blonde bleach job, the students obviously felt they had

an easy mark.  Soon bets were taken as to how long Miss

Betty would last.

     Betty introduced herself, stating that she recently

came from the South.  She certainly looked like a southern

belle who wore outdated clothes and whose beauty had peaked

a decade earlier, only she didn't know it yet.  Snickers

rippled in the room as she rummaged through the huge

shoulder bag she carried for a purse.

     "Have any of you ever been out of state?" she asked in

a friendly tone.  A few hands went up.

     "Anyone travel beyond five hundred miles?"  One hand

went up as the snickering diminished.

     "Anyone visited outside the country?"

     No hands went up now.  The silent teens were puzzled.

What did this have to do with anything?  Was she using

psychology on them, or was she just plain clueless?"

     Finally, Betty's bony hand struck on what she had been

searching for in her handbag.  Pulling up a long tube, she

unrolled a map of the world.

     "What else do you have in there?  Lunch?" someone

cracked.

     Betty smiled lightly and answered, "Cookies for

later."

     "Cool," Nick quipped.

     Then she pointed with a long fingernail to an odd-

shaped continent.

     "I was born here," she tapped with her finger.  "And I

lived here until I was about your age."

     Everyone craned their neck to see where it was.

     "Is that Texas?" someone sitting in the back asked.

     "Not even close.  It is India."  Here eyes twinkled

with joy.

     "How did you get way over there to be born?"

     Betty laughed.  "My parents were missionaries there,

and that is where my mother was when I came into the

world."

     "Cool!"  Nick leaned back in his chair duly impressed.

     Betty fumbled again in her purse, this time pulling

out a handful of old wrinkled pictures along with a tin of

chocolate chip cookies.  They passed the pictures around,

viewing each with great interest.  Dark faces stared up

from the photos, frozen in time.  The kids studied them as

they bit into the sweets.

     "You don't have to be a missionary - everyone can do

something in this world to help another," Miss Betty said.

     The hour quickly slid by as she told them her stories

about faraway places and what the people were like there

and how they lived.

     "Wow, this is as exciting as TV!" one young girl told

her.

     Sunday after Sunday, Betty came to class, tying her

lessons to their everyday lives.  She told the teens how

they could make a difference right now.  The students grew

to love her, bleached blonde hair and all.  The more they

liked her, the lovelier she became.

     Betty taught that Sunday school class for twenty

years.  Though she never married, or had children of her

own, the town came to think of her as a surrogate parent

since she taught two generations of children.

     At last, her hair grew into a natural gray.

Increasing wrinkles about her mouth and eyes added

character to her cherub face.  Her hands began to shake

with age.  Every now and then, she received a letter from a

former student.  There was a doctor, a research scientist,

a homemaker, a businessman, and many teachers among them.

     One day she reached into her mailbox and pulled out a

blue envelope with a familiar foreign stamp in the upper

right-hand corner.  In the left corner was the name of a

boy in that very first Sunday school class, years ago.  She

recalled how he'd always liked her cookies and seemed so

interested in her lessons.  A picture slid out of the

envelope and onto her lap.  Squinting her eyes, she smiled

at the man in the photo, still seeing the teenage boy in

him.  Standing in the rubble, in a quake hit city in India,

he stood with other volunteers who had come to help the

earthquake victims.

     The caption read, "Because of you, I am here now."