Have you ever met someone who made you feel like a million
bucks? It’s as though you were just
embraced by warmth, joy, and patience for the very first time. You feel all your pains, insecurities, anger,
and guilt just melt away from the experience.
This is called kindness. We don’t
experience it very often but when we do, we recognize it and we long for more
of it. What blows my mind is that God
cultivates kindness in us. In short,
kindness is a fruit of a plant grown inside our hearts. We can water this plant, feed it, give it sun
or we can be awful caretakers and never see the fruit this plant can bear. Instead of a fruit born in us, we treat
kindness as commodity for sale to the highest bidder of our affection.
Kindness is not for sale.
Kindness is meant to be free.
As a follower of Jesus you were given the gift of the Holy
Spirit, which has the primary objective of making you a whole, perfect,
complete person. One of the jobs the Holy
Spirit has is cultivating fruit inside you as you walk in relationship with
God, refining you into a reflection of Himself.
In other words we’re meant to look more and more like God. Amazing. Kindness is just one of the many fruits
cultivated in a believer if they so choose.
Some choose rudeness, bitterness, and contempt. They choose to look down on others for not
believing the way they do. Some of those
beliefs can be as shallow as music taste.
Then there are things like differences of religion, sexual choices,
race, economics, etc. that cause some
not to be kind. Another form of lacking
kindness is those who believe that if they’re kind in one way, then there need
not be any other reflections of kindness.
For example those that give money to help others, but still treat
everyone with contempt, and a pretentious spirit. One act of kindness, kind does not make. You dig?
Kindness is proactive, selfless, and above all life
changing.
If you are not being changed by kindness daily then you have
missed out on much in life. Some are too
humble to receive kindness. This isn’t
real humility, it’s pride. If you can’t receive
kindness because it makes you weak, then you have missed out on life changing
kindness. Insecurity is also not
kindness. To believe you are somehow too
bad to receive kindness because you’re not kind enough to others, or you’re not
good enough at such and such, you have missed out on the very thing that could
change all of that. Some think that to be brutally honest is more
important than kindness. Truth is
vitally important, but kindness is of equal importance. Try to quit being such a stick in the mud,
lighten up. Life’s too short to be so
focused on whether it’s important to tell someone their joke isn’t funny. Laugh not because it’s funny but because it’s
kind. At least smirk, or somethin’.
To receive and give kindness requires you to stop thinking
of solely yourself. It requires you to
think of others and love them. Anything
that robs you of the ability to be kind or receive kindness needs to be
destroyed before your soul is.
I agree that kindness should not be sold and that it should be given for free. I agree that mans default should be kindness and we should pursue kindness towards one another regardless of difference in ideology, philosophy, and theology... But, I also recognize there is a time to stand tall and place kindness in the holster. Sometimes we need to be blunt and hard spoken, not for the sake of pride or being right, but because kind words aren't always heeded. It takes a special kind of love to look someone in the face and without hate or malice tell someone they screwed up.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you. Confrontation is tricky because it feels like at times we have to be blunt to get through. Sometimes it feels we have to be manipulative too. It sucks feeling like you're out of options when you want to tell someone they've done something wrong, but I believe humility and kindness must always be preserved. If you have done this in your confrontation then it becomes about them and the holy spirit, not us. We can never have such a huge agenda that we fall to let kindness rule in our hearts. Now, when confronting another brother in the faith, we're given guidelines especially when it is sin we're talking about. In short bluntness isn't always unkind, but we must always make sure we keep ourselves in check because we're not redeemed to be rude, bitter, manipulative or spiteful.
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