Sometimes it’s the little things that make the biggest difference … the small acts of kindness that come our way … the two bit chances that made things turn out differently … someone who saw potential in us no one else did … the employer who helped open doors for us … a fellow parent whose advice made all the difference … someone who heard us out through a dark time … our lives are testimony to the power of the little things …
Those small acts of kindness stand out because sometimes they emerge as a great contrast to the character of the larger context we find ourselves to be in … sometimes they are the foreground against the background of loss or a long stretch of bad luck or a toxic environment in our workplace or a tough patch in a relationship … or amid our despair for the world.
I remember a very self-absorbed time in my life … a time when I was utterly preoccupied with decisions I needed to make and the implications of those decisions … it felt like I hadn’t seen the sun in longer than I could remember. I was in my small and selfish world of the moment … putting money in a parking meter on my way to an appointment when I noticed an older woman pulling her grocery cart up the hill. She stopped and spoke to me about nothing in particular that broke into small world she engaged me in a simple human exchange … a conversation about nothing special … just a plain, nothing fancy human moment that nudged me out of my own locked room. I often wish I could have that moment back … and return the kindness by offering to carry her groceries up the hill to her door. She will never know how many times I return to her simple act of kindness in speaking to a stranger.
It was a little leaven in a stranger’s day … a little yeast … someone sharing a smile, risking a greeting, speaking a few kind words with a complete stranger she’d never see again.
But what good is just a little leaven of kindness stacked up against a disproportionate mountain of meanness or indifference in the world? And what’s a few sprinkles of yeast in the face of three measures of flour? According to the Jesus tradition, it is enough to make a difference. In fact, it is enough to create more bread than your average peasant family could eat before it would mold. For this 1st century teacher, it created a situation capable of transforming a situation of scarcity into an occasion for hospitality …
The parables we ‘ve attributed to Jesus of Nazareth make this 1st century wisdom teacher sound like a contemporary teen … well, like the kin-dom … well, its like treasure, eh … and like, you know, like a pearl, … and it’s kind a like a banquet, like a really big banquet … and it’s like … uh … like this seed growing like secretly under the ground …
One of his really radical short stories is the one we just heard a moment ago about a very small seed … it is as if Jesus said … Like there was this gardener … and like the gardener went out into a field where uh .. like a whole bunch of dandelions had gone to seed … and the gardener collected as many seeds as he could and like … then he came home and went out into his garden and planted as many of those dandelion seeds as he possibility could! Wow! If this gardener was your next door neighbour, wouldn’t you be like beyond annoyed!
Even if this was the only story you ever heard Jesus tell you would know he must come from a long line of carpenters because clearly he knows next to nothing about gardening! What farmer in her right mind deliberately plants weeds? But Jesus tells just such an outrageous story about bad farming when he says that heaven on earth is just like someone who intentionally and methodically plants mustard in his garden. In first century Mediterranean society, everyone knew that mustard is the dandelion of the middle east … it’s a weed … once it is sown its almost impossible to get rid of … it’s an infiltrator … an invasive weed that tends to take over …
We’ve made this metaphor into a charming little simile about the capacity of a little bit of faith … of faith as small as a grain of mustard moving mountains … but Jesus was saying something much more radical than this … its about the power of infiltrating … of being like a community of dandelions in a field of daisies … bent on infiltrating the dominant culture … the meanness of an empire that had no heart … only an appetite to control all its resources … its land, its fishery … to infiltrate that culture with an alternative ethic … to plant kindness like a weed that eventually sneaks in and fills the field …
What if we were to take the seeds of kindness and sow them on the carefully cultivated fields that dominate our culture … fields like individualism, competition, capitalism, consumerism, globalization, and so on … What if we were to infiltrate a selfish culture with simple acts of kindness? The world needs both the gentle work of leaven and the sneaking infiltrating work of kindness … being just like yeast and just like mustard seeds … it needs love that quietly leavens and love that boldly colors the field with a whole different look … one weed of kindness that seeds yet another, and another …
Kindness is not always easy … it is often inconvenient. It is sometimes a rebellion against our first instincts … It is usually a choice … To speak or act kindly takes intention … requires an element of risk whether what we offer will be received or rejected … whether it will be valued or unnoticed … It isn’t a very sexy virtue … in a culture that is addicted to immediate responses … in a culture that is consumed with self interest and self protection it is sometimes a radical act to initiate kindness.
The etymology of our language gives us a big clue that kindness wraps itself around the notion of kin … that kindness has something, maybe everything to do with treating another as we would treat our kin, our kind … ourselves …
And kindness requires mindfulness … paying attention to our words …filtering our words and actions at least three times: is it true? Is it helpful? And is it kind? We live in the mundanely sacred moments of life. Few are positioned to be in positions of power to change the world in monumental shifts but each of us has an extraordinary capacity to change the shape of a moment, a relationship, a transaction, an exchange, an encounter, a meeting, a deal … we have the ability to practice kindness in spaces we inhabit …each of us however old or young are equipped with what is needed to change the world … an inch … 2.54 centimetres … at a time … with the smallest of seeds … as small as the mustard seed … as effective as yeast … the humble seed called kindness … that comes in countless shapes, grows in any soil, does well in any climate … can be plant in every season … We just have to be awake to those opportunities we have to infiltrate with kindness … to be a dandelion …
-Nancy Steeves
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