Good Job!

At the English academy for elementary school students where I worked, we gave students a “Good Job” stamp at the end of each class. Each day, they worked through their assigned lessons and then took a quiz. They received one stamp for good behavior in class and another for getting a perfect score on the quiz, so they could earn up to two stamps a day. Since many students did not finish the day’s assigned work and therefore could not take the quiz, filling all thirty spaces on a stamp card could take quite a while.

Students could use one or two stamps right away to get a snack, but if they saved all thirty without spending any, they could receive a 5,000-won (about $4) gift certificate for a local variety store. Most of the children spent their stamps on snacks during breaks or before going home. Whenever one student traded in stamps for a snack, the others would soon follow.

One day, while organizing the stamp cards, I began to wonder whether any of the students had ever saved all their stamps instead of spending them. When I asked the academy director, I learned that one student had. Instead of using the stamps on snacks, the student saved them all for a gift certificate to give to their mother. I was deeply moved by such thoughtfulness at such a young age.

Seeing how much the child wanted to make their mother happy reminded me of the brothers and sisters around the world who preach the gospel to bring joy to Heavenly Mother. They glorify God through their good deeds and devote themselves to the gospel with perseverance, whether in the heat or the cold. I imagined Heavenly Father and Mother looking at them and saying, “Good job!”

I, too, want to fill my own stamp card with “Good Job” stamps through good and righteous deeds and wholehearted gospel preaching, and become a child who brings joy to God.