George Patten was an 8-year-old kid who told his friends he had shaken the hand of the new president. "Did not," they probably jeered. "Did so!" he probably shot back. And so it went, back and forth, back and forth, as it so often does with kids.

The new president little George Patten was talking about was Abraham Lincoln, and the year was 1861. George insisted that he'd shaken Lincoln's hand the year before in Springfield, Illinois, when George was with his father, a journalist. But the little boy's classmates just wouldn't believe him. Finally, George's teacher wrote a letter to President Lincoln to discover the truth. Surprisingly, Lincoln wrote back. His note was short and sweet:

Executive Mansion, March 19, 1861.

Whom it may concern,

I did see and talk with master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois.

Respectfully, A Lincoln.

Sometimes it is hard to believe the places to which ordinary people can go—where they can find themselves, who they can meet. Take us, for example. We who are Christians are taught to see ourselves in a whole new way in the Bible. "Once you were not a people," Peter wrote, "but now you are the people of God." Jesus even taught us to call God "Our Father in heaven." And in Ephesians 3:10, Paul says something altogether shocking—that we who know Christ are so favored by God that the angels stare in wonder!