We’ll take a cup of kindness yet
Eat more fruit. Drink less beer. Rebuild contact with an old friend. Stop beating the wife (or husband as the case may be). New Year resolutions. Specific courses of action to take. Goals with measurable outcomes. Targets, almost.
As Christians, if we make resolutions, we will almost certainly pray for the power to keep them. But we are still liable to forget and to fail.
The fruit of the Spirit is different. First, because it is not so much a matter of will as of allowing the Spirit to nurture and ripen the fruit in our lives. And second because it entails a constant reshaping and refining of our character.
Today we come to the fruit of kindness - a simple virtue, untrumpeted but enormously significant in the lives of other people. Kindness is goodness expressing itself in actions and words. Wordsworth wrote of 'that best portion of a good man's life, His little, nameless, unremembered acts, Of kindness and of love'.
For kindness is, of course, another expression of love - the love that thinks of others, is aware (consciously or unconsciously) of others' feelings or needs, and instinctively does and says things that affirm them, encourage them, comfort them and warm their hearts. This is not the heroic love that gives its life for someone (and that few of us are ever called on to demonstrate) but the everyday love that brings light into people's often drab lives.
So who needs our kindness? In a word, everyone. Even the boss will appreciate the colleague who remembers to ask, with genuine interest, after his or her sick child. But in all of our lives there are people who are in deep need of kindness - people who don't get much of it at home, people who shrink from company for fear of being rebuffed, people who are new and anxious in their jobs. To say nothing of the people in our own households with whom we are so familiar that we hardly notice them.
So let us, in this new year, resolve to cultivate the Spirit's fruit of kindness.
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