This past Saturday, Ellie Lofaro and Kathy Troccoli were at our church doing a women’s conference, and I was there as a member of the tech team, running lights and video for them. During one of the sessions, Ellie was talking about the realities of being a parent. She described a typical scene in her house—one which, based on the amount of laughter in the room, almost everyone there could relate to, including me.
Ellie explained that one moment she could be thoroughly annoyed with her kids, yelling and making a huge fuss. The scene was interrupted by the phone, however, and instantly she was transformed into the model of kindness, her voice dripping with more butter and sugar than a Paula Dean dessert.
It occured to me this morning that this phrase—”the kindness of strangers”—is a bit ironic. Why is it that we are kinder to people we’ve never met than we are to those who are closest to us?
I’m sure a big part of it is image. We’re so concerned in this society with image and impression and reputation. So we put on a performance for the strangers, pretending to be kind when we really don’t feel like it. With the people we love, we drop our guard and we can lash out in hurtful and damaging ways.
But God says that love is kind. The kindness we show should never be an act or a cover-up. Real, honest love is naturally expressed when we’re kind to other people, and the more we love them, the kinder we should be, not because it’s what we’re supposed to do, but because it’s an automatic outgrowth of that love.
Kindness is also a fruit of the Spirit, of course, and so our kindness grows not just with our love for other people but also with our relationship with God. The closer we are to Him, the more we will be capable of kindness.
So does this mean that we should never be angry or tell our friends things that they might not like because it wouldn’t be “kind”? Definitely not. But we can be angry with someone and still treat them kindly. We can tell someone a hard, blunt truth in a way that is respectful and gentle. Kindness to me is putting the other person’s needs and interests before mine. It may mean protecting their feelings, but that’s not the most important thing, and if protecting their feelings will end up damaging the relationship in some other way, then it’s not the kind thing to do. Then it becomes that cover-up, hiding the reality.
So I’ve begun to stop and think about how I’m responding to other people, especially those I love. If my actions and words aren’t kind, that tells me two things: it tells me that my walk doesn’t line up with my talk, that I need to change my behavior to line up with my reality—not as a performance to cover up my feelings, but as a reflection of my truefeelings for that person. It also tells me that I need to very closely examine the relationship, though—is there something getting in the way, something causing a problem that I need to address instead of ignoring?
I’ve been told that love is a choice, and I believe that. I choose to act lovingly, kindly, towards people, and that is an expression of love. Of course there is the emotion of love, too, but I believe that grows out of the choice, not the other way around. Choose to love someone and you will begin to feel love for them.
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