This book just off the press this year 2017 is an impressive
collection of Life Changing Stories. The
author, editor, and compiler of this book is none other than Joe L Wheeler,
known as “America’s Keeper of the Story.” Joe has compiled 80 books so far of
stories. This includes his ever-popular Christmas in My Heart series of which
there are 25 titles in print.
These stories are a wonderful way to inspire and teach.
Life Changing stories:
One of the most frustrating aspects of
life is that there are so many choices along the way: we are constantly having
to choose one option, one road, instead of the other. Robert Frost implies that choices are not
necessarily between good and bad, but rather between two goods of roughly equal
value. But, oh, how he wishes he could explore both-or at least come back again
sometime. But he sighs, “Yet knowing how way leads on to way, I doubted if I
should ever come back.”
Joe Wheeler in this collection of stories provides us with
stories that we can learn from the mistakes of others and avoid making them
ourselves as well stories from which we can learn good examples to follow.
Absent with Love: This story is about Captain James Boyd of
the Marines, when he was a young man working on his Dad’s farm and was thinking
of running away from home, which would have been a mistake. The young man was
tired of taking care of the cows and doing all other jobs that had to be done
on the farm. Then one day, a family, the Kurtzes, traveling by had a flat tire
– they had a son about his age so they invited him to come with them on a
summer vacation across the country seeing lakes, canyons, Boiling springs,
geysers, rainbow trout, bears, deer, elk, buffalo, etc.
[This trip had such an impact on him such that when he got
back home, he had a different attitude and was ready to pitch in and help run
the farm, which he did and within 3 years, the mortgage was paid and the 4th
year he went on to college.
Captain James Boyd sums it up this way: “Think how near I
came to missing out but for that flat tire of the Kurtzes I might have been a
hobo!”
On the Far Side of
Failure-An amazing story by Arthur Gordon in which he tells how he learned
that a good formula for success is “double your rate of failure.” He counsels
that “If you can learn to learn from failure you’ll go pretty much where you
want to go.”
To Bleed Awhile and
Fight Again-This story by Joseph Leininger Wheeler about when he was fired
for the first time in his life and it
felt as though the very foundations of his world were collapsing under him He
learned how to pick up and move on successfully.
A Temperamental Garden A very interesting story of Isabel who
started her garden as sort of graveyard
for moods and blues and that kind of thing, and then when it began to pay so
well she became interested in it for its own sake.
The First Settlers
Story - The lesson in this story is contained in these lines:
“Boys flying kites haul in their white-winged birds
You can’t do that when you’re flying words.
“Careful with fire,” is good advice we, we know
“Careful with words,” is ten times doubly so
Thoughts unexpressed may sometimes fall back dead
But God himself can’t kill them once they’re said!
All the stories in this book can lead one to think and avoid
a mistake that may produce a bad outcome or to emulate a good action that may
produce a very good outcome.
For more information about this book, including the chance
to read the first chapter on line and to order online you can go to:
