Be Ye Kind One to Another

Acts of kindness sometimes go unnoticed by the general public. Yet the recipients know and are blessed. I once observed an act of kindness that I have never forgotten-a kind and tenderhearted act.

It was at a healing ministry’s conference where the priest leading the conference was praying for the sick. That day’s session was drawing to a close. Many had come forward asking for prayer. And one by one he laid hands on them and prayed for them. People were still standing in line when the priest suddenly announced, “I’m sorry, but I am very tired. I will pray for three more and then I must leave. I will pray again tomorrow.”

The woman who was next in line glanced back at those behind her. The frail-looking woman immediately behind her carried a small oxygen tank with its tubing connected to her nose. She looked ill. The first woman turned, touched the woman with the oxygen tank gently on the shoulder, stepped out of line, and moved that woman to be first in line. I heard another priest say to her as she walked quickly from the room, “You will be blessed for that.”

I was in attendance the next day but the woman who left the line was not. I have often wondered how she was blessed for her act of kindness. I’m sure she was. A stranger to me and, perhaps to the frail-looking woman as well, she exemplified Christ’s nature in a beautiful way.

In the King James Version of the Bible, Ephesians 4:32 says, “Be ye kind one to another”, the New International Version uses the word “compassionate” there. One dictionary’s definition of compassion is sympathetic consciousness of other’s distress together with a desire to alleviate it. Doesn’t that describe Jesus?

Being the recipient of compassionate blessings, some time ago I began a Blessing Book, just a simple spiral-bound notebook in which I date and note these special acts of kindness. Periodically, I read through the book and pray again for those persons to be blessed. And I also note special acts of kindness observed or reported to me.

One reported act involved a friend who discovered she was out of check blanks in her checkbook and with very little cash as she stood in line at a store’s checkout counter with forty dollars’ worth of groceries rung up and awaiting payment. She said, “I was so embarrassed, so flustered; I didn’t know what to do.” But the man standing immediately behind her did; he said, “I’ll pay for your groceries, I know you will pay me back.” A complete stranger to her, he wrote his name and address on a slip of paper and although she objected, he insisted, and she walked out of the store with her groceries. She said, “I mailed him a check immediately upon returning home, thanking him again for his generosity.”

And I consider the man, a stranger to me, who paid for my meal at a restaurant during a time when I really needed a blessing. He had said, my waitress told me later, “God told me to pay for that lady’s meal.”

Jesus went about doing good; so do the compassionate ones.