A long time ago, there was a young boy who lived in a distant land. He was a cheerful boy. He had a special friend, a little blue hummingbird. The little boy didn’t have a lot of friends, but the little bird and the boy were inseparable. The boy loved the little humming bird a lot, so he built him a home. The bird also loved the boy; it would follow him wherever he went. As time went by, their love grew.

One day, the young boy met a pretty girl who had long hair, blue eyes, and a cute smile. This was around the time of the biggest dance of the year. The boy could only think about how wonderful it would be to take the girl to the dance. He gathered his courage all day and at the end of school, asked the girl to go with him to the dance.

The girl was very popular and felt she did not want to be seen with the boy who cared for her so, but she did not want to hurt his feelings. She figured out a way to avoid saying no or yes. She told the boy that if he brought her a red rose, she would go with him to the dance.

This hurt the little boy because he knew that there had never been a red rose in the land where they lived. The only roses in the land were white. On the way home, the boy kept mumbling to himself why couldn’t the girl ask for a white rose. There were hundreds of them around.

Feeling annoyed, he didn’t even notice his friend fluttering above him. The bird could tell that the boy was upset. The bird hovered closer as the boy mumbled. The bird got to know why the boy was so disturbed. The bird was impatient all night long. He kept thinking of a solution to the boy’s problem.

As the sun began to rise, the bird found an answer to how he could help his best friend. The little blue hummingbird flew to a rose bush and looked for a large rose with a stem that had thorns directly above it. The bird cast his small body against a sharp thorn. Drops of blood started falling on the white petals of the rose.

As the boy got ready for school and left the house, he saw a red rose. He could not believe it, he ran to the bush and plucked the red rose. He was so excited that he failed to notice the lifeless body that lay below the bush. Before he reached school, some boys playing football in a field asked him to come and play.

His first thought was, no, as he had something more important to do. But they requested him to play as they needed him to even the teams. He looked at the rose, then the boys, then back at the rose. He thought to himself that the girl didn’t really want to go with him anyway. He threw the rose down and played football.

• The boy is each one of us.
• The humming bird is God.
• The girl is eternal life.
• The rose is the atonement.
• The football game is the worldly things we sometimes feel are very important.