[I]f anyone gives even a cup of cold water to one of these
. . . he will certainly not lose his reward.
—Matthew 10:42
“Random acts of kindness” has become a part of our vocabulary and hopefully our conduct: paying the check for the person in the car behind us at the drive-up window; giving a bottle of water to the guy mowing the lawn.
We owe the thought to Anne Herbert. She was responding to her despair at the violence that was dominating the news, expressed by one journalist as “random acts of violence and senseless acts of cruelty.” Anne reversed the phrase, jotting these words on a restaurant placemat in Sausalito, California: “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.”
Anne wasn’t the first to preach kindness. A couple of thousand years ago, the apostle Paul wrote, “Be kind and compassionate to one another” (Eph 4:32).
Can you find an opportunity to do that today?
Kindness has no language barrier.