“In a world shouting to be heard, what if we chose kindness instead?”

 A reflection on why gentleness might be the most radical choice we can make.

When our girls were teenagers, they, like so many others, had a whole variety of friendship groups.
Sometimes they would come home and tell us someone had been rude to them. When this happened, we regularly said, ‘Be nice.’

We did not want our daughters to be rude in response to the rudeness they experienced.
(Who knows how they really responded, but that was our hope!)

Currently, it seems we have a contrast in our culture between blaming varieties of people for the problems we face–an acceptance of shouting the
loudest so our desires can be heard–and a culture promoting kindness. We suspect many of us would prefer to be in the corner of those expressing
kindness. Perhaps being kind is not exactly the same as being nice, but they are similar.

Is kindness a Jesus value? Was Jesus himself always kind?

There are times in the Gospels that Jesus was confronted. When that happened, he did not back down.

When he was in the Temple and overturned the tables, he was clearly angry with the .…….Read More