Michele Williams
Education Consultant/Advocate
“The success of a child is the true measure of the adults who surround him.”
Isn’t This Supposed to be HEAVEN?
by Michele Williams
A special education administrator died and went to heaven to see about getting in. St. Peter said, “Well, your mom and dad are here saying you should qualify, but I don’t know. You see, we have to conduct our own evaluations. It will take 6 – 9 months, or maybe two years. We’ll let you know. Would you sign this consent for evaluation right here, please?” So the man took a seat on a cloud and waited none too patiently.
A year later, St. Peter comes back to the man and says, “Sorry, but that Consent form wasn’t the right one. Would you sign here please.” A year later, the man is called in for a conference to talk about the evaluation. A psychologist angel said, “Well, we noticed that you were extremely impatient while waiting, drummed your fingers a lot, seemed not to pay much attention to instructions, and you let us have you sign the wrong form at the get-go. We suspect you probably have attention deficit disorder. We don’t do behavior modification here, but we do have a detention room where our offenders do time before being sent to Hell if they can’t figure “it” out. We noticed you had trouble learning how to sit on our clouds, so we suspect you probably need some physical and occupational therapy. You’ve been rude and deceitful with parents of children with disabilities on earth, but with extensive counseling, you can probably overcome that. You’ve been playing crony games with public funding and key positions, and with personality readjustment therapy, you can probably overcome that. You’ll have to work hard, try harder than you’ve ever tried before. If you can make sufficient adjustments with our accommodations, you might be awarded a diploma entitling you to entry into heaven. It could take as long as 12 years, but we are optimistic.”
The personality readjustment angel worked diligently with the man and began to see progress. Still, when the man was frustrated, he acted out and was not exactly heavenly-appropriate in some of his antics and verbal expressions. The personality readjustment angel said to his parents, “I’m sorry, but if he doesn’t make more progress soon, he won’t make it. ”
“He needs more counseling, some training sessions, perhaps some role-playing, social skills training,” his parents said.
“Sorry,” the angel said. “There are far too many other angel candidates and I’m overbooked as it is.”
The angel gave no clues as to what procedures heaven might have for increasing the administrator’s personality readjustment services, and the parents were sure that since this was heaven, they would have been told everything they needed to know and all necessary help would be given. So they rested on faith.
St. Peter assigned the administrator a physical therapist who worked with the man to teach him to sit properly on clouds and a flight instruction angel to teach him how to fly. The administrator got the hang of sitting on clouds pretty well, but he had a ton of trouble learning to fly. “Look,” he kept protesting, “This flying bit isn’t easy. I’ve got to learn to trust not having ground beneath my feet. I’ve got to keep looking at the horizon instead of the furniture around me. I’ve got to keep from banging into other angels. My flight instruction angel only shows up 80% of the time. I need more help.”
“Sorry,” St. Peter said. “You’re not trying. If you speak up on your own behalf, you’re showing a basic lack of faith and trust, and it has tinges of disrespect for our authority. We can’t have that around here. We’ll have to give you detention if you keep complaining.”
The administrator shut up. But the next day, he took off from his cloud with his flight instruction angel’s full approval and promptly plunged toward Hell at full speed, flapping all the way.
“I have to say something,” he screamed. “I told you I needed more help, and it would help if I had both wings!”
“Sorry,” his flight instruction angel shouted downward. “We don’t have the funding for that.”
Copyright 2001, All Rights Reserved Michele Williams. May be copied in its entirety for non-profit use only. Please notify us of your intentions.