The "You Just Have To Read These Stories!" Story

It was an ordinary day.  Reading a page in my monthly Reader's Digest Magazine titled "Glad To Hear It!"  Just had to share it with you since the three stories were all so moving!  The lead title of the stories was "Glad To Hear It"...and I most certainly was!  The stories were...

Dancing the Tears Away.  Jarom Ngakuru, a Maori man living in Robinson, Texas, was devastated.  His grandmother had died in their native New Zealand and he couldn't get home for the funeral.  That's when, he said on a TikTok video, his co-workers "brought home" to him.  His brother-in-law taught the men the intricate choreography of the Dhaka, a traditional Maori dance.  They gathered in a large room and surprised Ngakuru with the dance: a quick squat, a vigorous thrust of the arms and a stomp of the feet accompanied by guttural shouts, followed by more complex moves, stomps and chants - the hallmarks of the Dhaka.  Halfway through, a stunned Ngakura joined them.  At the end, the men held their last position as Ngakura wept in his brother-in-law's embrace.  Said a video commenter from New Zealand, "I don't think they even understand how beautiful an act this is."

White Knight/Black Belt.  Han An was inside his family-run tae kwon do studio near Houston when he heard a scream from the cell-phone store next door.  An, followed by his family, ran over and found a man assaulting a woman.  An, an eight-degree black belt, grabbed the man's shirt, but the man slipped the hold.  So An grabbed the guy's pants, pulling him off the shaken woman.  As the man punched and bit, An's son Simon joined the fray, helping to pin the attacker to the floor.  The younger An told the Washington Post that although his father had prepared them for emergencies, "it still shocks me ... because this is, for me, a once-in-a-lifetime thing."

A Cut Above.  Some 25 years ago, the customer sitting in Irvin Russel Pelton Jr.'s barber chair in Detroit had come back from a war zone with the horror he'd seen still fresh in his mind.  Pelton let him vent.  Afterward, "He handed me an envelope.  It was a suicide note," Pelton told ABC 7 News in Lawton, Oklahoma.  It was more than a haircut that saved the man's life - it was Pelton's willingness to listen. And now that he retired, Pelton is traveling to all 50 states in his RV to give free haircuts and lend an uncritical ear to veterans and others so that they know "we care about them," he told WGR in Buffalo, New York.  Pelton is amazed by their transformation.  "Something as simple as a haircut can change a person's life." 

AMEN!!