Kindness Implies Action

 

Ephesians 4:31-32 

"Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ’s sake hath forgiven you."

Let ALL of the hurtful emotion be put away.  

That sure is hard! My memory holds onto way too much detail of negative situations.  But I believe I can learn from them and that as we have been promised, our weaknesses can become strengths through His grace. Tonight was an example when my memory turned out to also enable me to show kindness. 

Ella came downstairs and asked what she should do with this belt buckle.

Confused, I asked her where she had gotten it. 

She explained that it was at the bottom of the box to her electric putting green which I had purchased at a yard sale last summer.  This was the first time she had emptied the whole box.

While it would have been easy to discard it, it was a personal enough item that I thought it sure would be nice to get it back to its owner.  

This was one of the times my memory helped instead of  hurting and I remembered that a former coworker had given me the information about the sale where I picked it up. 

In a matter of minutes I was able to track down the phone number, message them and agree to bring it straight over. 

It turns out that the woman had sold the golf gear for a friend.  The buckle belonged to his father who had sadly passed away.  It was a touching gift to have come back into his possession when he had no idea what had happened to it. 

The woman simply said, "Thank you so much. It was such a kind thing to do."

It made my night too and gave me a chance to show my kids that it's through the little things that we can show others that they are cared about.  

Sister Betty Jo Jensen explained:

"Kindness has many synonyms—love, service, charity. But I like the word kindness because it implies action. It seems like something you and I can do. Kindness can be shown in so many ways. My favorite examples of kindness come from what Jesus did. He spent his ministry searching for the weary, the sick, the poor, and the lonely, that he might show kindness toward them."

What is something kind someone has done for you?

Thank them. 

What is something kind you could do for someone today? Who comes to mind who might be weary, sick, in need of resources, or lonely? Don't wait for a grand plan to come into place. Take action now! 

Often kindness means paying attention to the little details.  And it's a great way to begin to put away the anger and the bitterness that erode our happiness.