This is a story that is pretty common, it’s spread around the internet, I received it in the mail a couple of times myself. But to those who haven’t read this story yet, I believe this story is worth sharing so here goes…

A man came home from work late, tired and irritated, to find his 5-year old son waiting for him at the door.

The father was crushed. He put his arms around his little son, and he begged for his forgiveness.

Its a simple story really, the moral of it is even simpler then the story itself. Alot of times, we work so hard that we forgot what we are working for. Its so easy to immerse yourself in work and tell yourself that you go to work to earn money, as a means of livelihood. But think about the real reason why you work. Very often, you work hard to support your family, your children, your pets and even if you’re single, you work hard to repay your parents for all they have given you.

So your working really hard for them, but is it really worth it to work so hard for them when in the process you forget about them? Materialistic needs are stuff that changes with time, like fashion that changes with each season, such needs are never permanent. I could want an Ipod today and a Playstation tomorrow. It doesn’t matter if you fufil all of your childrens materialistic wants, but it’s very important that you learn how to fufil their needs. They need you to be there for them on their graduation day, on their first day of school, on their parent-teacher rapport station and they need you to be there for dinner every single day to listen to what happened to them in school.

Sometimes its not all about giving, its also a little about taking. You should be a little selfish sometimes, selfish enough to let go of the additional money you might earn for working an extra hour. Use that hour to spend it with your children and it makes a huge difference to them.

Think about it. How much does your hour cost? $50? Think about it again. How much are you missing in your child’s/parent’s/partner’s/pet’s life by coming back an hour late?

$50/$60/$70/$100 in exchange for an hour to let your children know how much you love them by listening to them.

Suddenly, that amount of money doesn’t quite add up to what your missing now does it?

I realise it’s superrrrr boring to have like one colour which is solid black for the posting so I’m going to try my very best to add some life and some colours inside.

Anyway, my mummy was reading my previous entry where I mentioned about a father who had to sacrifice his child for others. But she was totally going gaga over what I was saying so I realised that maybe some people haven’t heard the story before. Hence, this entry. I know the title “If I gave you 5 seconds” is seriously a horrible title but I’ve racked my brains for a thousand eons and thats the best I could come up with so thats that. Before I tell this story, I would like to ask you a question. If I told you that you had 5 seconds to decide if you wanted to save one person or a few hundred people, which would you choose? Remember how easy it is for you to answer me now and think about this again after reading my story. Now for the story.

This is a story about a father, Mr. James who was working as a train attendant and his 5 year old son. Mr. James’s wife had recently passed away, leaving him the sole caretaker of his 5 year old son. As they were a poor family, he couldn’t afford one of those fancy baby-sitters and had to bring his child to work with him. Now the train track had a track which had been closed for a very long time and so he set his child on that track and asked him to play with his toys there while he went about doing his work.

A few years later, that same woman came back to the train station, carrying a child in her hands. She had recognised the grief on his face, the grief of losing a child. As she was riding on that train that fateful day, she had lost her only child in a miscarraige. So she saw a kindred spirit and it gave her the strength to carry on. And now she brought her child back to give the same strength back to Mr. James.

So now I would like to ask you once again. If I gave you 5 seconds to decide if you would choose to save one person or a few hundred people, would that decision come as easily to you as it did before? How many of you would choose to save your child? How many of you would choose to save those people who would never know of your sacrifice? How many of you thought of how stupid it was for that man to place his child on a long abandoned track? How many of you judged that man and called him heartless based on the decision that he made?

Sometimes it’s really easy for us to judge people’s decisions based on the surface of words. But how many of you know the anguish and the pain behind that person’s decisions? And how many of you can actually judge other people for the decisions they made? So before you judge people, before you think it’s that easy for them to come to a decision, think about what they’ve gone through. And never judge a person based on the decisions they make, but by the process through which they made them.