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Kindness, Compassion, and...


          Be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving each other, just as in Christ God forgave you. (Ephesians 4:32)  

            Here’s the second rule to not grieving the Spirit. It’s not enough to not do all the bad stuff, you have to do the good stuff. A question in one of my writer’s groups has me thinking about kindness and compassion. Both of these call for wisdom. I’ve mentioned before the damage done when people kindly and compassionately destroy local economies by giving things that the economy can provide for itself. There are also times when so-called kindness and compassion do harm because they they don’t motivate the person to help himself. It’s not kind to wheel a child around in a stroller so that they don’t learn to walk. Kindness and compassion are only kindness and compassion if they meet a need without doing harm (or doing as little harm as possible.) Both can be codependent or toxic.
           This is one I struggle with. I don’t tend to be good at knowing where the line is between helping and enabling or between kindness and truth. But we are to be kind and compassionate meeting the needs of others and walking through their struggles with them.
           We are also to forgive. There are lots of difficulties with this one, too. What does it mean to forgive? It doesn’t mean to pretend the event didn’t occur, or that it wasn’t harmful. It doesn’t involve pretending at all. It doesn’t mean letting the person get away with it without consequences. It means ceasing to have your life defined either by that person or what he/she did. It means moving on, and sometimes, it’s hard. It is an undeserved gift, but isn’t that what gifts are? If they were deserved, they would be payment.  
           Back in Eden, Adam and Eve were tempted with the idea of being “like God.” So often, we seem to think it means throwing around lightning bolts and being like the people described yesterday. But this is part of what being like God really means: kindness, compassion, forgiveness….

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