WLSU: Loving Kindness

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I want to be kind. I want to be kind today, to be kind tomorrow, to be kind relentlessly. I want to make it my discipline. I’ve already failed at my New Year’s resolution, so I may as well start all over again today and make this my new one. I resolve to be kind.

Kindness matters. Kind words matter. I do not always understand the power of my words, but they have the power to tear down or to build up. When I speak kindly to someone, I am making a material difference in their life. Maybe they show it, maybe they don’t. But we are eternally connected, and kindness matters.

Kindness is not a Hallmark card. It is not a cloying call for a so-called return to the civility of the good old days that never really existed. Kindness is ferocious and powerful. Kindness is salvation.

To devote myself to kindness is to recognize the beauty and belonging of every person on this earth. Kindness is the practical application of acknowledging that each person is made in the image of God. Kindness is what it means to love my neighbor as myself.

Sometimes I forget the truth, and I start to think that kindness is weak. But kindness is strength, because kindness insists that the person to whom I am speaking carries holiness within them, bears the image of God. And to believe this is true takes strength and to act like it’s true takes courage. Because if I’m honest, I don’t always think someone has the image of God within them. I don’t always believe that a person is connected to God. I can believe in monsters just like anybody.

Hatred, spite, and demonization is dehumanization – the misguided belief that someone does not belong to God, was not made by God, is not magnificently loved by God. To let hatred have a voice is a direct decision to give in to the darkness of the powers that seek to corrupt and destroy the creatures of God.

The skeptic in me immediately points to the times Jesus says things that I see as harsh or brash. I can then say Jesus isn’t always kind, so why should I be? But when I pay attention to the words of Jesus, I see that every single one of them insists that the person to whom he is speaking belongs to God. Jesus’ words, even the rough ones, are kind because they acknowledge the inherent humanity and dignity of their recipients. Jesus does not think of anyone or speak of anyone as trash – not even his enemies. When Jesus critiques, when Jesus stands up and speaks out, when Jesus is angry, it comes from his conviction that the person in front of him is fully human. Jesus carries within him a deep yearning for even his enemy to see their own humanity and live into it.

I cannot blame Jesus for the times I don’t want to be kind.

No, I want to learn to be kind to someone even when I don't want to, even when I don't think I care about them. I want this because my kindness has the capacity to alter my understanding of the person right in front of me. In kindness, this person who was an obstacle to my happiness becomes a source of my own transformation. They gave me a chance to love when I didn’t think I could, and in so doing, they have been Christ to me. So I want to be kind even when I think I don’t want to – so that I can allow the kindness to saturate me.

In our Scriptures, there is a word that gets used a lot about God, and it is translated as “loving-kindness”. This is one of the primary descriptors of God, and one of the consistent pleas in the Bible is that God would show us their loving-kindness.

And of course kindness is connected to love. Of course it is. Kindness is insisting to love you as you are, not as I want you to be.

Speaking of which, I want to tell more people I love them, I want to say I love you without hesitation, say it often and easily and without flinching. And then I want my actions to prove it. Perhaps that’s why I don’t always tell people that I love them: I’m afraid that if I say it then I will have to act as if it’s true - like some sort of integrity alarm going off internally.

Or maybe it’s that I think to say I love you is risky, like the other ways of being kind – because it may not be returned, it may not be appreciated, I will feel vulnerable, I will feel as if I’ve put something of myself in your hands and I’m afraid of what you will do with it. But as my friend Jimmy tells me, we are all of us already in the hands of a competent God who loves us. So we are not putting our love out there all alone. We are not the first to love. When we put love out there, we are simply returning the love that was given to us in our creation and our redemption. It may feel risky, but it is no risk – not really. It is the requiting of the love for which we are made.

Loving-kindness is the proper response to recognizing one of God’s children standing right in front of me. We are both in the same hands, we are connected to one another. God has placed us in each other's lives. The challenge of the Christian life is to place love at the center of your being, and to stop pretending that anything else matters as much as that.

There is only one time to live and it is right now. This is the appointed time. You and I, we were not born too soon or too late. We were not made for some other imagined time. We were brought here now. God has chosen to place us in this life together. These are dark, scary, divisive times and I am praying for the strength to forsake cynicism, bitterness, hatred, dehumanization, and apathy. I am praying for the courage to be kind, the strength to love with abandon, and the wisdom to know that loving-kindness is the power of God. God, give me eyes to see that when I choose love and kindness, I am participating with you in the reconciliation of all things.