Pages tagged "kindness"

It is so hard to escape teenage-land when you’re on a trip with nineteen other teenagers. Our Junior Friends Service Trip to Guatemala was full of silly dramas and crushes and a lot of very loud laughter. In my head, I was culturally sensitive, inquisitive, and open. But I’m not sure that’s how I appeared to the Guatemalans I met. We dressed respectfully, and I used my broken, beginner’s Spanish. We loved it all – and we didn’t quite know how to interact with any of it.

When springtime in Seattle finally comes out from under its winter blanket of fog and drizzle, its smile is bright and its mood is balmy. That’s the kind of day it is – a Sunday in May, shortly after Easter – when Fred comes out of church and finds himself striding down the hill.

A person can be nice to someone in order to cheat them, but they cannot be kind to them to cheat them; that would not be kind. When Micah taught, “Do justice; love kindness; walk humbly with your God,” the lesson was not to love persons, but to love an attitude towards persons. An attitude that honors the self-respect of every creature and accepts indebtedness to the common good (and hence, indebtedness to the particular creature one is facing) – this is kindness. When engaging in acts of healing, kindness is not over-cautious about insult or injury. The hard truth and the surgeon’s scalpel both cut when they are needed. Recovery is hard work, but healing is only possible when corruption is excised. Also, to enter into another’s healing is always an act of reciprocity.

Three principles which are especially relevant to this effort [to act in accordance with perfect virtue] are inclusiveness, self-sacrifice, and noncoercion, which are each part of the nature of God. Our practice of these principles may be grouped together as radical hospitality. Radical not in the sense of oppositional or of extreme political identification, but in the sense of “at the root.” Hospitality lived “at the root” says everyone is welcome, everyone has a place at the table, everyone has enough, no one has too much. Rather than putting myself and my possessions at the center of the story, radical hospitality remembers that God is at the center of the story, guiding us to act as God acts.