Dress Up!

When I was in the secondary school, every afternoon after lunch, we used to go to the road in front of the boarding school and stood there, waiting for the passers by to come. We didn’t stand there for nothing, but we were there to play our small trick. I found it was good fun and of course we didn’t plan to do any dirty tricks that could harm others.


The trick we had in mind was very simple. Maybe it wasn’t exactly a trick; more a kind of ‘positive game’ among us. It was quite unusual for us, the boys in the boarding school, to have such a game. The game was “to make the passers-by smile at us”. (It sounds simple, right! but it’s not!) One of us would stand beside the road & when the passers-by came, he had to smile at them and if they responded back with a smile, it meant that he won and therefore he could choose somebody else to replace him. We didn’t get any prize for being successful except our happy face when we were able to make the passers-by smile at us. It was a beautiful game.

Recently I just read a nice quotation that I got from a friend of mine via email. I just smiled at it because of my memory of ‘the beautiful game’ that I had played in my school years ago. It says: “The best way to dress up is to put on a smile. A smile is an inexpensive way to improve your looks”. But personally I believe the best smile is not a ‘beautiful game’ or even a ‘pure game’ anymore but it is pure virtue that comes from one’s beautiful heart. It says in the book of Samuel (1 Samuel 16:7): “The Lord does not look at the things man looks at. Man looks at outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart”.

(By Nilora)