A kind word is like a Spring day. ~Russian Proverb
Hi, everybody. Hope you’ve heard many kind words today and perhaps shared a few with others. At least we can have spring in our hearts that way even if we’ve still got snow of the ground. It snowed again here last night!! And again today. Not much. We maybe had an inch on the ground and it’s mostly melted so I don’t think the school kids are going to get another holiday. But we did call off our church services. I started to say we called off church, but church is whether we have services or not. Our members (and people are the church) are still living their lives and being a witness by how they live those lives whether we meet at the church building or not. When we’re being our best, we can all be good witnesses and practice kindness to bring the feeling of spring to those we meet.
I know you’ve all heard about random acts of kindness. Good things people do without any expectation of reward or anybody telling them they have to. I experienced a couple of those random acts of kindness last week and it did make the sun feel a little warmer. First I thought I lost my cell phone. Any of the rest of you ever do that? Stick it in the wrong pocket or dump it out accidently in your car? Well, maybe I’m the only klutz, but anyway, I did misplace my phone from Point A to Point B last week when I was going to the grocery store. I knew I had it in the car when I left my mom’s house to go get her groceries. I’d fished it out of my pocket and was going to make a call as soon as I stopped. But when I got to the grocery store, the phone was missing in action.
I searched through my purse at least five times. I searched through the car. The only other place I’d been was to fill up my gas tank, so I drove back there in case I had dumped it out when I got out of the car. The pavement was empty and the guy in the payment booth said no one had turned in a phone. I went back to my car to search again, and one of the guys came out and got my number to give me a call. You know it’s loads easier to find those lost phones when they’re ringing. As long as you don’t let the batteries run down. Or let a cow eat it the way my husband did once when he dropped his phone out of his belt holder when he was feeding grain to the cows. Thank goodness she spit it out and didn’t swallow it whole. Once he found it and wiped the cow spit off, it was good as new. That’s better than some of the stuff he could have wiped off it. Anyway, so the gas station guy gives me a call and my phone starts ringing. It was right there in my purse, playing hide and seek with my checkbook, I guess. And I had been touched by a random act of kindness from someone who went out of his way to help me.
Then after I got my groceries and was loading them in my car, a woman came by and offered to take my empty cart to the cart corral. I’m quite capable of doing that myself, but she just wanted to do a kindness. A very little thing, but again something she didn’t have to do. I hope this week I can remember to pass on their kindness in some other way to someone I meet and make the sunshine feel a little warmer on another person’s shoulder.
What random acts of kindness have you done or had done for you? When I googled kindness to see what other people have to say about kindness, I discovered there is even a website to help you think up random acts of kindness you can do for others. Isn’t the web something?
Here are some random quotes on kindness that I hope will encourage you.
- Kindness, like a boomerang, always returns. ~Author Unknown
- The best portion of a good man’s life – his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love. ~William Wordsworth
- Today, give a stranger one of your smiles. It might be the only sunshine he sees all day. ~Quoted in P.S. I Love You, compiled by H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- What this world needs is a new kind of army – the army of the kind. ~Cleveland Amory