The Happy Hailstone (A Children's Story)

[based on actual events]

Once upon a time there was a sad, lonely hailstone in an angry storm cloud. He was sad and lonely because he was the very first hailstone queued up to fall out of the cloud, and there was nobody around to talk to because all of the other hailstones were behind him. As we all know, hailstones' faces are on their fronts, and never on their backs.

He waited and waited for the storm cloud to burst. It seemed like it would never happen. Finally, one day, the wind got stronger, the air got more electric, and the cloud let out a big belch of lightning - the storm had arrived!

The little hailstone was pushed out of the cloud as fast as a rocket. He fell and fell, and got scared, because he saw the ground getting closer and closer and he knew that when he hit, it would hurt a LOT.

He saw that he was heading for a beach, and hoped he would hit the soft sand, but then a gust of wind blew him more inland, and he saw that he was going to hit the roof of a house! Ooh! How very painful it would be!

So he strained his little hailstone body (as only hailstones know how to do) to try to miss the house and land on the grass instead. The ground sped closer and closer.

But he saw he was not going to hit the grass, and would instead hit the wooden deck beside the house. He started to panic.

Suddenly, a somewhat frumpy man, dressed only in red swimming shorts, knelt down on the deck and began to wash sand off his feet with a garden hose. Before the hailstone knew it, he had landed on the soft, cushy back-flesh of the bent-over man, which had tremendous shock-absorbing ability. The happy hailstone bounced gleefully off the man's back and onto the soft grass, intact as the day he was formed.

The man (whose name was Doogie) yelped and said, "That's going to leave a welt!"

The hailstone only smiled, and began to meditate on how God had protected him from a hard landing.