A Touch of Kindness.
Kindness is a way love is expressed. A reason love multiplies, and an example of what is possible when love is prioritised. Love is the invisible thread that ties kindness to its peers.
- It is the sincere and voluntary use of one’s time, talent, and resources to better the lives of others, one’s own life, and the world through genuine acts of love, compassion, generosity, and service.
- A warm smile is the universal language of kindness. As the sun makes ice melt, kindness causes misunderstanding, mistrust, and hostility to evaporate.
- Like a snowball rolling down a steep hill, it increases and intensifies until it becomes such a formidable force for good it knocks down the evil barriers of anger and animosity that stand between us and the peaceful world we want.
Kindness is a key that can unlock self-imposed prisons such as selfishness and hostility; a bucket that can douse bitterness and blame; a tool that can tighten and strengthen bonds, and a creator of laughter and delight.
- It allows us to branch out beyond the confines of what can be written and immerse ourselves in the beauty of what can be felt.
- Words on a page can begin to paint a picture, but they can never thoroughly represent all that’s special about kindness or all that it can accomplish once it’s put out into the world.
- It exists as heartfelt words of encouragement, thoughtful gestures of affection, and compassionate acts of generosity so many of us witness, perform and receive as we move through life.
Being kind means offering ourselves without conditions or expectation of reward. The reward for kindness is the inner positivity, rather than any external reward or recognition.
A Blessing in disguise.
Alice’s house was across the street from the entrance of a famous hospital in the city. She lived downstairs and rented the upstairs rooms to outpatients at the clinic.
- One summer evening as she was fixing supper, there was a knock at the door. She opened it to see a truly awful-looking man.
- He’s hardly taller than her eight-year-old, she thought as she stared at the stooped, shrivelled body. But the appalling thing was his face–lopsided from swelling, red and raw.
- Yet his voice was pleasant as he said, “Good evening. I’ve come to see if you have a room for just one night. I came for a treatment this morning from the eastern shore, and there’s no bus ’till the morning.”
- He told me he’d been hunting for a room since noon, but he had no success as no one seemed to have a room. I guess it’s my face. I know it looks terrible, but my doctor says with a few more treatments.
For a moment, she hesitated, but his following words convinced her: I could sleep in this rocking chair on the porch. My bus leaves early in the morning.” So I told him we would find him a bed but to rest on the porch.
- She went inside and finished getting supper. When she was ready, she asked the old man if he would join them. “No, thank you. I have plenty.”
- And he held up a brown paper bag. When she had finished the dishes, she went out on the porch to talk with him for a few minutes.
- It didn’t take long to see that this older man had a big heart crowded into that tiny body.
- He told her he fished for a living to support his daughter, her five children, and her husband, who was hopelessly crippled from a back injury.
- He didn’t tell it by way of complaint; in fact, every other sentence was prefaced with thanks to God for a blessing. He was grateful that no pain accompanied his disease, which was a form of skin cancer.
He thanked God for giving him the strength to keep going.
At bedtime, we put a camp cot in the children’s room for him. When I got up in the morning, the bed linens were neatly folded, and the little man was out on the porch.
- He refused breakfast, but just before he left for his bus, haltingly, as if asking a great favour, he said, “Could I please come back and stay the next time I have a treatment? I won’t put you out a bit. I can sleep fine in a chair.”
- He paused a moment and then added, “Your children made me feel at home. Grownups are bothered by my face, but children don’t seem to mind.” She told him he was welcome to come again.
- On his next trip, he arrived a little after seven in the morning. He brought a big fish and a quart of the largest oysters she had ever seen as a gift.
- He said he had shucked them that morning before he left so that they’d be nice and fresh. She knew his bus left at 4:00 a.m., and she wondered what time he had to get up to do this for them.
In the years he came to stay overnight with them, there was never a time that he did not bring fish or oysters or vegetables from his garden.
- Other times they received packages in the mail, always by special delivery; fish and oysters packed in a box of fresh young spinach or kale, every leaf carefully washed.
- Knowing that he must walk three miles to mail these and knowing how little money he had made the gifts more precious.
- When she received these little remembrances, she often thought of a comment her next-door neighbour made after he left that first morning.
- Did you keep that awful-looking man last night? I turned him away! You can lose roomers by putting up such people.
- Maybe we did lose roomers once or twice. But oh! If only they could have known him, perhaps their illnesses would have been easier to bear.
- Alice knows their family will always be grateful to have known him; from him, they learned to accept the bad without complaint and the good with gratitude.
Recently Alice was visiting a friend who has a greenhouse. As she showed Alice her flowers, they came to the most beautiful one of all, a golden chrysanthemum, bursting with blooms.
- But to her great surprise, it was growing in an old, dented, rusty bucket. She thought to herself, “If this were my plant, I’d put it in the loveliest container I had!” Her friend changed her mind.
- “I ran short of pots,” she explained, “and knowing how beautiful this one would be, I thought it wouldn’t mind starting in this old pail. So it’s just for a little while till I can put it out in the garden.”
- She must have wondered why she laughed so delightedly, but she imagined just such a scene in heaven. “Here’s a wonderful one,” God might have said when he came to the soul of the sweet old fisherman. “He won’t mind starting in this small body.”
Conclusion.
In a world filled with struggle and pain, kindness is like a deep cleansing breath that rejuvenates us with its purity, refreshes us with its goodness, and gives us the strength to persevere despite our troubles.
- It involves choice because many alternatives will tempt us through life including apathy, bitterness, jealousy and anger.
- Circumstances will test us. People will try us. Negative news will trouble us. Yet, despite these obstacles, we each have the beautiful ability to actively choose to be kind.
We see beyond the scope of our problems and work to use our lives to do the most good for the most amount of people so the world is a better place because of it.