(Beautiful Essay)美文+录音20篇
来源：英语周报
发布时间：2009-09-02 18:21:00
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内容提要：Is it worth it?Put first things firstThe power of encouragement
No small act of kindness
（第11期）
Driving along a busy Houston road, my two little girls became hungry at noon. They wasted no time in letting me know, shouting “McDonald’s, McDonald’s, McDonald’s”. So I began searching for the nearest McDonald’s. Suddenly I realized that almost every intersection we passed through was occupied by a beggar. If my two little girls were hungry, then all these beggars must be hungry, too.
After finding a McDonald’s and ordering two Happy Meals for my girls, I ordered an additional 15 lunches and set out to deliver them. Then, we would pull alongside a beggar, and tell him or her that we hoped things got better. Then we’d say, “Oh, by the way ... here’s lunch.” And then we would go to the next intersection. It was the best way to give.
As we came to the end of our “route”, there was a woman standing there, asking for change. We handed her our final lunch bag. “No one has ever done anything like this for me before,” she said with amazement. I replied, “Well, I’m glad that we were the first.” Feeling uneasy, and wanting to move the conversation along, I asked, “So, when do you think you’ll eat your lunch?”
She looked at me with her huge, tired brown eyes and said, “I’m not going to eat this lunch. I have a little girl of my own at home and she just loves McDonald’s, but I can never buy it for her because I don’t have the money. But you know what ... tonight she is going to have McDonald’s!”
So many times I had questioned whether our acts of kindness were too small or insignificant to really effect change. Yet at this moment, I recognized the truth of Mother Teresa’s words: “We cannot do great things — only small things with great love.”