The Power of Kindness
May 7, 2022 by Rosemary Flaaten
Filed under Daily Devotions
By Rosemary Flaaten –
Holding the door for the young mom pushing a stroller and keeping two toddlers in tow.
Waiting with uncommon patience while the clerk looks up the produce code for my purchase of artichokes.
Sitting with a young couple as they wait for their one year old daughter to return from having a cancerous tumour removed in surgery.
Stocking the pantry with food my teenage son’s friends can devour as they hang out at our home.
Complimenting an elderly woman that she looks like a million bucks in her fur-collared coat.
Acts of kindness.
I’ve been on a mission this spring to be the purveyor of kindness. A purveyor is someone who provides, supplies or makes available. My mission has been to ooze with kindness, to seek out opportunities to show kindness and to do so to a variety of people.
On the days that it seems easy to show kindness to the total stranger at the grocery store, it proves a struggle to come home and speak kindly to the loafing family member. Other times, I’m unwittingly overlooking the person beside me and their need for a kind gesture in favour of a self-absorption that doesn’t allow me to look past the end of my own nose.
To live out the commandment found in Mark 12:30 to love the Lord my God with all my heart, mind, soul and strength I must love my neighbour as myself. The age old question of delineating who might fall into the category of neighbour was fully explained when God became Incarnate and moved into our neighbourhood even though our neighbourhood was characterized by hostility and abandonment. God chose us as His neighbour and He showered us with kindness and love.
Kindness is the quality of compassion and generosity. It’s what spills out of us when we’re filled with God’s Spirit. It cannot be manufactured but it can be practiced. Choosing to discipline ourselves to be someone who seeks out opportunities to show acts of kindness will impact three realms:
1) it’s an act of worship to the God who acted kindly to us
2) it will impact the recipient – who knows how God might use that act of kindness to draw that person to Himself?
3) we’re blessed through obedience –“It is a sin to despise one’s neighbor,
but blessed is the one who is kind to the needy” (Proverbs 14:21 NIV).
Prayer: Lord, gives us eyes that are like Yours so that we might see the needs of people around us and a heart like Yours to be purveyors of kindness.
“Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32 NIV).
As a dynamic speaker and an award winning author of "A Woman and Her Relationships" and "A Woman and Her Workplace" , Rosemary Flaaten's passion is to see people deepen their relationship with God and others. She lives in Calgary, Canada.