Kindness

Learn to be happy when others succeed: Be like the little boy who returned from auditioning for the school play and said, “Mummy, I got brilliant part. I’ve been chosen to sit in the audience and cheer for my friends.”

Source: The UCB Word For Today , 07/06/2003

John Ruskin (1819-1900), the English art critic and social reformer, loved to tell the tale of the lamplighter. As a boy, Ruskin, would often look out from his bedroom window to watch the street lamps being lit around the town. The “lamplighter” would carry his lighted lamp on top of a special pole and would move from one lamppost to the next throughout the town. As darkness began to fall, Ruskin would lose sight of the lamplighter but he could always tell where he was and where he had been because of the trail of bright lights he left behind him.

Jesus said, “You are the light of the world… don’t put your lamp under a bowl… instead let your light shine” (Matthew 5:13-16). We should be ‘lamplighters’ shining in this dark world, leaving a trail of lights burning behind us and seeking always to leave a place brighter for having visited.

Steve Sjogren wrote a book called Conspiracy of Kindness. He started a church in Cincinnati, Ohio, that has grown rapidly to an average attendance of 7,500 in just fifteen years. Their motto is, ‘Small things done with great love are changing the world’. They carry out random acts of kindness like paying for a stranger’s coffee, or writing a ‘thank you’ note to a shop assistant. They have discovered the power and impact of ‘showing God’s love in practical ways’. (…) People from outside were attracted because of what they saw happening on the inside. They were attracted by the sheer undiluted power of God released through ‘acts of kindness’.

Source: Nicky Gumbel, Bible in One Year – Alpha, Day 157 of 365

In the autumn of 2009 a few dozen people travelled to London to mark his one-hundredth birthday celebration and to thank Nicholas Winton. The group themselves were mostly all in their seventies or eighties. But this was no social trip. It was a journey of gratitude. They came to thank the man who had saved their lives: a stooped centenarian who met them on the train platform just as he had done in 1939, seventy years previously.

Nicholas Winton was a twenty-nine-year-old stockbroker at the time. Hitler’s armies were ravaging the nation of Czechoslovakia, tearing Jewish families apart and marching parents to concentration camps. No one was caring for the children. Winton got wind of their plight and resolved to help them. He used his annual leave to travel to Prague, where he met parents who, incredibly, were willing to entrust their children’s future to his care. After returning to England, he worked his regular job on the stock exchange by day and advocated for the children at night. He convinced the government to permit their entry into the country. He found foster homes and raised funds. Then he scheduled his first transport of child refugees on March 14th 1939, and accompanied seven more over the next five months. His last trainload of children arrived on August 2, bringing the total of rescued children to 669.

On September 1st, the biggest transport was to take place, but Hitler invaded Poland, and Germany closed borders throughout Europe. None of the 250 children on that train were ever seen again.

After the war Nicholas Winston didn’t tell anyone of his rescue efforts, not even his wife when they got married. [Over 40 years later] In 1988 she found a scrap book in their attic with all the children’s photos and a complete list of names. She prodded her husband to tell the story [and afterwards she secretly contacted a popular TV programme called, ‘That’s Life’: The presenter, Esther Ransom, sneaked the unsuspecting Nicholas Winton into the studio and then revealed his story to the world.]

The grateful group of people he rescued includes a film director, a Canadian journalist, a news correspondent, a former minister in the British cabinet, a magazine manager, and one of the founders of the Israeli Air Force. There are some seven thousand children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren today who owe their existence to Nicholas Winton’s bravery – and who remember him with joy. (He died in Slough in 2015, aged 106.)

Show the following YouTube clip: www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_nFuJAF5F0

Source: Max Lucado, 2010, Our Live Your Life, Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville Tennessee, USA, p.15-16

Once while Abraham Lincoln was dining in the White House one of his guests blew on his coffee, poured it into his saucer, and drank from it. As you might imagine, some of the refined ladies and gentlemen seated nearby were aghast, and for a moment the room was filled with an embarrassed silence. Then Lincoln took his coffee, poured it into his saucer, and for the rest of the evening drank directly from it. And you know what? Everyone else in the room followed suit! One small act of kindness saved a White House guest unbelievable embarrassment. And that simple but thoughtful gesture by one of America’s greatest presidents reminds us of the value of setting an example of kindness.

Source: The UCB Word For Today, 20/2/2016

Chances are you’ve never heard of Stephen Grellet, a French-born Quaker who died in 1855. He’d still be unknown to the world at large, except for a few immortal lines that will likely be remembered forever: ‘I shall pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.’ Each day has one thing in common with the next. Both offer opportunities to show kindness, and when missed, those opportunities leave you with unwanted regrets.

Source: The UCB Word For Today, 20/2/2016