Cultivating kindness

Personal Photo: Inside a secretary's desk that my mom and I found was this little treasure :)

Happy May, everyone! It is finally time to start planting our flowers, fruits, and vegetables, and I welcomed the brief sunshine that peeped out today. It was so nice to see spring starting to come back. With the lack of gloomy rain, Clay and I took our chance and planted our berry patch, and also our two blooming honeycrisp apple trees, in our backyard. Yes, planting season is among us, my friends, and it could not be a better yearly reminder of how every important, sustainable, lovely thing starts out very small, and is often hard or impossible to see at first.

May is Planting and Sharing month, which is all about growing your own. I want to take this theme of growing and sharing, and apply it to the way that we can use kindness to grow our faith, and the faith of others. I am personally a big supporter of the concept of growing your own--eating out of your own garden, being as self-sufficient as possible, and allowing hard work to really bare some fruit (literally!). I love all kinds of planting though, both food and flowers, which makes this time of year so exciting. One of the things that brought this theme of planting and kindness to the forefront is that there was a set of seed packets in my parents' mailbox this week, each one with either a prayer or a Bible verse on it, related to the theme of planting. My parents donate to a handful of charities, and one of them is the St. Joseph's Indian School; because of the donations, they often send my parents small gifts, such as a reusable grocery bag, a pair of socks, dreamcatchers, or, like this week, a set of seed packets. Not only was it a thoughtful gesture of thanks, but it also reinforces the message I am striving to communicate today: One small act of kindness can go a long way, and it can grow into something very meaningful.

Since the beginning of creation, planting and harvesting have been integral to the survival of society. Cities and communities choose where to settle because of the quality of the soil, the ability to farm equates to the ability to survive, and in the early days of society, people would trade food and goods as a way to connect with others. Even today we gather with friends and families for occasions completely built around a meal; a meal in which someone had to plant the seeds for and harvest and sell. My point is that when we consider kindness as important as we understand planting and growing and eating to be, we could begin to see our entire culture and attitude transform. Truly, the concept of kindness, and the journey of letting the Holy Spirit make a change in our hearts are quite similar to how one plants and grows:

Firstly, we must have a need to turn up the ground and make it plantable. We are dead to sin, and the only thing that can sustain us is the gift of salvation from God. Therefore, we cannot accept our sinful nature as a way to grow anything steadfast, so we need to break up the landscape of the earth so that the Holy Spirit can work within us. The hard and brittle foundation of sin is able to be transformed into a workable landscape for the seeds of God's love to take root and blossom. In fact, Hosea 10:12 tells us to "sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of steadfast love; break up your fallow ground, for it is the time to seek the Lord, that He may come and rain salvation upon you." In this verse we can see how it begins in us. We cannot sow the seeds of the Lord without it first being cultivated within us. The Lord's gift of salvation is the 'why' behind all of this. We love because He first loved us; we are kind because He is kind to us; we can be vessels because He first built our boat.

Next, we must plant seeds and have the faith that they will grow. In the same way that the farmer knows not how one seed can grow and the next one does not, we also must have the faith that even though not all of our seeds of kindness and love will grow into something more, that it is still worth sowing them because it could be just what the Holy Spirit cultivates. Mark 4:26-27 tells us "And He said, 'The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed upon the ground, and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should sprout and grow, he knows not why.'" Faith is the key when it comes to growing anything. We must care for it, give it the right ingredients. In this way, when we come to Christ, seeking righteousness, He can not only use our turned-up land to cultivate seeds planted in our lives, but He can also use us as planters ourselves, being a vessel for God's love and light. We can care for the seeds of the Lord in the same way that we care for the ones we put into the earth; we can continue to be kind, we can smile, be welcoming, be honest, be giving, be considerate, and so on and so forth. This is the implementation of our faith. We can trust that the seeds can grow into something lovely, can take root in the hearts of others, and can change their lives and ours. We just need to have faith that all we need to do is plant the seed, and to care for it, and God is what will make it grow.

Finally, once we turn up the ground in ourselves by coming to Christ, we plant seeds of kindness in our hearts and in the hearts of others, and we practice our faith by continuing to live by the principles of the Lord, we can eventually see the fruit of our labor. We can see how God has cultivated the seeds that were planted and how they have become sustainable sources of life. 1 Corinthians 3:6-8 explains "I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow. The man who plants and the man who waters have one purpose, and each will be rewarded according to his own labor." Here we can see that the Lord is what will make our harvest bountiful. He will create something beautiful out of something that is hard or impossible to see at first. As long as we have patience and faith, we will be able to see some of the impact of those seeds.

Now that I have mapped out some of the overlaps in the planting of our seeds of food and our planting of the seeds of kindness, I want to dig into why it is so important that we do so. Being kind is not something we do just because we are told to, no, it is something we do because we are moved to do it. Why should we allow ourselves to become so vulnerable by being kind? I mentioned above that the Lord's salvation is the 'why' behind everything we do. And this is true, it really is the foundation of which we base our entire lives upon. But to take this one step further, I want to squelch the doubting voice that is constantly telling us that what we do does not matter. What we say is not that important, the little details are often overlooked, and the things that we do don't really make a difference. These are all concepts that can easily influence the way that we live for the Lord. And they all are concepts we should abandon entirely. Matthew 13:31-32 explains to us why: "The kingdom of Heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches." This verse really expresses to us the why of it all. We should sow seeds of kindness because we never know what a difference it could make; we never know the bounds of who we could touch, what it could grow into, how big it can get. All we must do is plant the seed and the Lord will make it grow. The more we sow, the more we could reap. This is explained in 2 Corinthians 9:6 which reads: "The point is this: whoever sows sparingly will also reap sparingly, and whoever sows bountifully will also reap bountifully." In this way, we can see why our kindness is important, it does matter, and can make a difference.

I am convinced that kindness is the very best way to bring people to God. Our positivity radiates, and people cannot help but gravitate towards it. It allows for us to grow closer to God, it allows us to sow more seeds of kindness, and it allows us to practice our faith that our loving Lord is using our kindness to make a difference in our peers and in ourselves. My mom and I, at the end of last summer, had gone to an antique shop and picked out a secretary's desk to refinish. We were cleaning it out and stripping off the varnish when we came upon a faded sticker of a quote from Grellet on the inside of it. Below the title of 'Kindness,' it read as follows: "I shall pass through this world but once. If, therefore, there be any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now; let we not defer it or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again." My mom and I soaked in the little message that God let us find and when this topic of cultivating kindness came up for the season, I could not help but think of the quote. We all have the ability to be kind, we all have the ability to trust in the promise that the Lord will make the seeds grow, and we all have the ability to scatter our seeds of kindness far and wide.