A Year Of Kindness (XXXVI): Lending Our Strength

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You may remember that earlier in this series, we discussed the matter of kindness as loaning our strength to another.  Today's quote focuses on the same idea but from a different angle: not making the people to whom we are lending our strength through kindness feel the worse for needing it.

This concept should not really be difficult for me to consider.  If I think about all the times growing up I "helped" an adult with a project or "bought" a gift for my family, it is clear that it was not "me" doing it, it was the adult in the situation.  Yet never once in all my days can I think someone told me "You are not really doing that" or "You are not really buying that".

An element of kindness - perhaps more implicit than I think - is how we make the other person feel when they are receiving it.

We are all familiar with the bad sort of kindness, I should imagine:  the condescension that comes when someone makes a production out of doing a kind deed and the almost inevitable feeling of being the object of that condescension.  We feel small, worthless, perhaps even ashamed for the need.  

Kindness - at least as I see it - is a dance between doing the kind deed and never having the other person feel as if the deed (or thought or word or whatever) is any sort of an inconvenience or a big ask.  I place great value in the fact that we should always allow people their dignity - their honour - no matter what the situation.

Sometimes we find out it is a big ask after the fact of course:  the hours our parents worked so that we could do a thing, the sacrifice of someone offering to do something for us that they sincerely dislike, the person who did not have the time to attend to our issue but did anyway.

In a sense, is this not like Christ?

Yes, I know - there is a great division between us and the Godhead.  But in reading the Gospels, one constantly finds Christ offering kindnesses - healing, food, counsel, personnel management for his rather cranky group of disciples - and yet He never rejects those who sincerely came asking, or those to whom He freely offered His kindness.  We read occasionally of His struggles and His agony, but at the time this was often concealed from the disciples:  the 40 Days of Temptation, the hours spent praying at night alone, His exhaustion from the crowds.  Only at the end of His Life - at the Last Supper, at the Garden of Gethsemane - does He seem to hint to them in real time of what this has - and will - cost Him.

We, as Christians, should not do any less.

Let us offer kindness, but do it in such a way that its receivers feel anything but part of the process and never feel shame for asking for it or receiving it.