Try a Little Kindness
Posted on: February 17, 2014
- In: Everyday Life | Faith
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Be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle.
~ Plato, quoted in The Power of Giving by Azim Jamal and Harvey McKinnon
Choose to be kind.
That’s the message Kind Ottawa would like us to live out and the focus of Kindness Week, which runs from February 14th to February 21st.
I would love to see more people making that choice. Because the choice not to be kind is made far too often, as these examples I’ve witnessed show:
- A woman who has been working very hard to make confirmation classes happen in our parish was on the receiving end of a long, complaining e-mail and a ranting phone call.
- A patient berated a dental office receptionist while she remained calm and patiently tried to explain to him the process for submitting a claim.
- At a local department store, customers left their carts all over the parking lot instead of taking them to the nearby cart return—which meant that a store employee had to go all over the lot on a bitterly cold day to collect them.
What does it cost us to take a moment to thank people for their hard work, to put things where they belong in order to save someone else some effort, to offer a word of encouragement or help in learning a skill? These are the things that leave a positive mark on someone’s day—or even their life.
I still remember the way a teacher helped me learn borrowing in subtraction on her time, some high school friends collected homework for me when I had my wisdom teeth removed, a university classmate walked me home at night out of concern for my safety, and a friend tried to help me find a job when I moved to a new city.
“Death and life are in the power of the tongue,” Proverbs 18:21 tells us. So why not choose to make our words and acts ones that bring life? Why not thank, encourage and support others in what we say and do?
I pray that we would be inspired to try a little kindness this week and every week, remembering to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).
(Scripture quotes taken from the Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Second Catholic Edition.)
A Catholic Convert in Ottawa 