When Sarah, a sweet nineteen-year-old girl who temporarily lived with our family, applied for a job at the local bank she was called back for a personal interview.

"How did the interview go?" I asked when she returned home.

"It went alright at first," she said.

"At first?"

"Yeah, until the manager asked me if I was hired what would I bring with me to the job everyday?"

"Oh, there's lots of answers?like a good attitude for starters. Did you tell him you always have a good attitude?"

"No," Sarah confessed with a groan. "I told him I'd bring my purse."

Our friend Ernie was hospitalized with severe gall bladder pain. Being admitted at a particularly hectic time, the staff inadvertantly forgot to place the nurse call button beside him.

When the pain became excruciating?too overwhelming to get up and look for the button?our friend used Yankee ingenuity. Ernie picked up the phone, dialed the hospital's main number, and asked for the nurses's station on his floor. Explaining his situation and giving them his room number, help came immediately. For the rest of his hospital stay, Ernie received first-class service.

The Rowandale church band was meeting for their Christmas service practice. The female pianist, Melanie, was getting more and more flustered as she flipped through her music. Finally, she exclaimed to the other five male band members, "I can't find 'Good Christian Men'!" To which the drummer quipped, "You have a choice of five right here."

Whenever my six-year-old niece, Katie, would be asked her name, her standard response was, "I'm Katie, Pastor Allen's daughter."

Thinking she needed to assert her own identity, Katie's mother encouraged her to simply reply "Katie."

The next day, a man asked her name. "I'm Katie," she replied.

"Oh, you're Pastor Allen's daughter," he said, smiling.

"Well, Dad says so," said Katie, "but Mom's not real sure."