Something meaningful
 Ever just wish people would accept you for you?
 Not your abilities. Not what you can do for the team                
    
 Or how you always give of yourself. Or the fact that
 you are good at drawing. But YOU. Just you. Everything
 about you - your foibles, your bigger than average nose,            
 your clumsiness.

         There's a story about a soldier who arrived home
 on leave in the middle of World War II. He disembarked
 on New York City and called his folks. Everyone was overjoyed
 when he phoned and made plans to meet him at the train station.
 But then the GI stammered, "Mom, Dad, I have a friend with me.
 I wonder if you might put him up during my leave. But he has some
 problems: he's partially blind, and he has a leg shot off. Would you
 mind?"
         The mother sighed. "Well, bring him home, honey, but we 
 wouldn't want him to stay more than a day or two."

      The GI sadly hung up the phone. Sometime later they found his body
 in a hotel room, dead. He only had one leg, and they said he was almost
 blind. Those parents wept for their loss. But more than that, they wept 
 for a guilt they could probably never forgive themselves for.
 
 
         Alain, a French philosopher and essayist, wrote, "It's a
 small thing to accept people for what they are; if we really love them we
 must want them to be what they are."