ME-ssentials – Kind – Day Four
ME-ssentials: ESSENTIALS for Me to Be
KIND
September 4th, 2021
What’s your ESSENTIAL?
Essential: absolutely necessary; indispensable; the essence of a thing; inherent and intrinsic, vital
Colossians 3:12-14, ‘So, chosen by God for this new life of love, dress in the wardrobe God picked out for you: compassion, kindness, humility, quiet strength, discipline. Be even-tempered, content with second place, quick to forgive an offense. Forgive as quickly and completely as the Master forgave you. And regardless of what else you put on, wear love. It’s your basic, all-purpose garment. Never be without it.’ (MSG)
It’s been twenty years since Nine-Eleven. There’s so much footage, so many remembrances, a multitude of Memorials, testimonies, memories, stories. Seems like lifetimes ago and just yesterday all at the same time. Wounds are incredibly fresh, and even though the scars remain, the scabs have yet to form; it is still that recent. We see the embroiled sky with plumes of smoke; we hear the crash of skyscrapers and an echo of humanity as its heart shatters. There is no ‘Once Upon a Time’ any longer, no more make-believe and happy-ever-after, the day the pretense ended and we as a nation grew up and had to get our big boy and girl panties on. I remember where I was and exactly how I felt twenty years ago on 9/11, and other than the births of my children, I cannot say that about any other event in my life. I also recall how united I felt we became in those early days. You know, ‘United we stand; divided we fall’; so we had no choice but to stand…united and tall.
I think that means we were kind to one another; a characteristic we have now unlearned and forgotten. Our unkindness, and the loss of that quality in our behavior, is undoing us as a country, as a people, even as a family. When is the last time you felt someone else’s pain as your own? When did someone else feel your pain as their own? It is essential though in our humanity to feel, have and be kind to one another. It was bred in our DNA. In fact, do you know it is like a foreign body in how we were created if unkindness is found residing in us? Kindness should be like an article of clothing that we wear at all times, like underwear, however it must be changed and kept fresh, observed and necessary. In other words, don’t leave home without it!
You may never know when your kindness might be the only thing that stands between someone’s desire to die or willingness to live. You may also never know that someday you may need a person’s kindness to carry you through your desperation to the other side.
