More than random acts...

Remember the slogan "Practice random acts of kindness"? It's a neat little phrase--and who can deny the joy of having someone go slightly out of their way to do something thoughtful or nice for you? We remember such little expressions of human kindness long after the event. So what makes a little act of kindness something special, something that always gets our attention, something we don't soon forget?

We take special delight in acts of kindness of course, because they seem to be the exception rather than the rule in a world where pettiness, meanness, and spite are the name of the game. It's hard to surprise us anymore with news of human cruelty or evil. We are too jaded to be shocked by news of an insult, a theft, a lie... or by reports of much worse atrocities: murder, oppression, genocide. If people have a "default setting," it often seems to be "selfish"--and so, when an unexpected and unsolicited kindness interrupts the daily grind, it is all the more precious.

Imagine with me for a moment: a world in which kindness, not pettiness and evil, is the norm. In this imagined world, acts of kindness are not infrequent or even "random"--they are the the habitual result of lives consciously devoted to love and selflessness. This world might seem like a fantasy to us, but it's precisely the sort of life embodied by one man who walked the Earth almost 2,000 years ago--a man named Jesus. Jesus' life, defined by love, forgiveness, and mercy, points to something better than this world of meanness. God wants a world in which people are so focused on him that acts of kindness literally overflow from our hearts and minds.

What about you? God can change your heart, clean out the pettiness and the selfishness, and raise you out of a life consumed by selfishness and worn down by the petty evils we see around us. God wants to renew the world, person by person--and He can start in your own life. Think of it as the ultimate, divine "act of kindness"--and honor this act by performing acts of kindness, big or small, random or premeditated, in your corner of the world today.