Love and Mrs. Leonard – The Power of Seven Words.

What Did Mrs. Leonard Say?

I’m not quite sure of the source of this story so I can’t vouch for its authenticity. Even so, it is a story worth your time and it may be even more than that to some people.

The photo is not the girl in the story.  It’s just an illustration of a cleft palate.  Some are milder and some are much worse. – Dick S

I grew up knowing I was different, and I hated it. I was born with a cleft palate, and when I started to go to school, my classmates – who were constantly

teasing – made it clear to me how I must look to others: a little girl with a misshapen lip, crooked nose, lopsided teeth, and hollow and somewhat garbled speech. I couldn’t even blow up a balloon without holding my nose, and when I bent to drink from a fountain, the water spilled out of my nose. When my schoolmates asked, “What happened to your lip?” I’d tell them that I’d fallen as a baby and cut it on a piece of glass. Somehow it seemed more acceptable to have suffered an accident than to have been born different.

By the age of seven, I was convinced that no one outside my family could ever love me. Or even like me. And then I entered the second grade and Mrs. Leonard’s class. I never knew what her first name was – just Mrs. Leonard. She was round and pretty and fragrant, with chubby arms and shining brown hair and warm dark eyes that smiled even on rare occasions when her mouth did not. Everyone adored her. But no one came to love her more than I did. And for a special reason.

The Annual Hearing Test

The time came for the annual “hearing tests” give at our school. I was barely able to hear anything out of one ear and was not about to reveal yet another problem that would single me out as different. And so I cheated. I had learned to watch other children and raised my hand when they did during group testing. The “whisper test” however, required a different kind of deception: Each child would go to the door of the classroom, turn sideways, close one ear with a finger, and the teacher would whisper something from her desk, which the child would repeat. Then the same thing was done for the other ear.

I had discovered in kindergarten that nobody checked to see how tightly the untested ear was being covered, so I merely pretended to block mine. As usual, I was last, but all through the testing I wondered what Mrs. Leonard might say to me. I knew from earlier years that she whispered things like “The sky is blue” or “Do you have new shoes?”

My turn came up. I turned my bad ear to her, plugging up the other solidly with my finger, then gently backed my finger out enough to be able to hear.

I waited and then the words that God had surely put into her mouth, seven words that changed my life forever.

Mrs. Leonard, the pretty, fragrant teacher I adored, said softly,

          “I wish you were my little girl.”

The bible says we will be held accountable for our every careless word (Matt. 12:36-37).  Normally, this is taken as a negative – our every idle, harsh, or mean or untrue word.

I believe it also applies to life-changing positive words like “I wish you were my little girl”.

Don’t you?

A humbling thought – how powerful a few words can be!

7 Words That Changed My Life

I once had a boss, early in my career, who counseled a coworker of mine to

          “tell the truth and fear no man”

when the man feared retribution for telling the truth.

I don’t know if those words changed his life but they changed mine.  I remembered those words when I was “on the hot seat” several times and I counseled others with them.

Do any life-changing words come to your mind?

Want to share them to encourage all of us?

Drop a Comment below.

Its easy.

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Love and Mrs. Leonard – The Power of Seven Words.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.