A story from Don Bosco's collection

Two loonies, wrapped up in cloaks and trembling from the cold, entered a certain inn and asked the innkeeper to light a fire to warm them up. The innkeeper went over and lit a huge fire, then went off. Meanwhile one of the men got so close to the fire that had he been made of straw he would immediately have been incinerated. The other stood at the entrance to the room, pulled his hands out of his cloak and held them out to the fire to warm himself.

Meanwhile the one who was standing right up close to the fire shouted: "Curse the fire! It’s burning me!" The one who was standing right back said: "Oh! I’m just as cold as I was before," and they called the innkeeper.

He came and asked both of them what kind of fire, what sort of wood it was if one said he was just about on fire while the other said he felt no warmth at all. And then, noticing that they weren’t quite right in the head, he said to them: 

The problem is not the fire, it’s you. If you back there would just take four steps further forward, you would be able to warm yourself, and if you here would just take two steps back you would not be so hot for sure. 

They did as he said, then after warming themselves for a while they left, praising the fire, the wood, and the innkeeper’s advice.

The two loonies are an image of people who don’t know how to use things properly, thinking they are bad while instead they are excellent, and complain about them. It doesn’t matter how good something is if you don’t know how to use it. Riches are good: but they are bad in the hands of someone who is either extravagant, squanders them in vice and gluttony, or is greedy and keeps them locked up in a steel box.

[For more stories from the collection made by Don Bosco himself for his boys, click here.]