Practice Random Acts of Kindness and See the Face of God

[Michie]

God does not assess our guilt as it compares to others; God is not a college professor who grades “on the curve.”


After delivering a speech a few years ago, a member of the audience came up and told me that something I said to her decades ago had helped her tremendously. I remembered having met her, but had no idea that anything I said had such an impact in her life. I have experienced a few of these “George Bailey” moments, and it’s always amazing — Mr. Bailey might say “wonderful” — that a few random words of kindness and encouragement can have such a powerful effect.

But I sometimes also wonder about words of unkindness and discouragement that have escaped my lips over the years. How many people in my life have needed a smile, a pat on the back, or a kind word that I failed to deliver? It’s a sobering question to which I will never know the answer. That thought has me worried, but it also has me motivated to look in the mirror when it comes to problems in the Church — and do something about it.

In the past few years, I have been very critical of some members of the Church hierarchy. To be sure, some prelates have practiced a ghastly cruelty toward the innocent, accompanied by an inhuman lack of compassion and readiness to cover up anything that might indict them or embarrass the Church. The monstrous crimes of these men have made Catholic evangelization nearly impossible.

Their sins have caused another problem that is largely unaddressed, namely that — by comparison — our own lesser sins against neighbor seem quaint and whimsical. We might justify our actions by thinking, “So what if I said something uncharitable to a family member or cheated a stranger? Big deal! Look at what that bishop did!” It’s easy to see how that thought process can occur; after all, we live in a society that encourages us to compare ourselves to others. But God does not assess our guilt as it compares to others; God is not a college professor who grades “on the curve.”

Continued below.
Practice Random Acts of Kindness and See the Face of God

 

[Victor in Christ]

No Christian church/congregation is without sin. Sin must be dealt with in our own lives, especially within a church. Numbers 32:23, Matthew 7:5

Matthew Henry's commentary on Numbers 32:16-27

Here is the good effect of plain dealing. Moses, by showing their sin, and the danger of it, brought them to their duty, without murmuring or disputing. All men ought to consider the interests of others as well as their own; the law of love requires us to labour, venture, or suffer for each other as there may be occasion. They propose that their men of war should go ready armed before the children of Israel into the land of Canaan, and that they should not return till the conquest of Canaan was ended. Moses grants their request, but he warns them of the danger of breaking their word. If you fail, you sin against the Lord, and not against your brethren only; God will certainly reckon with you for it. Be sure your sin will find you out. Sin will surely find out the sinner sooner or later. It concerns us now to find our sins out, that we may repent of them, and forsake them, lest they find us out to our ruin.

A word of comfort in Christ is good, we all need to grow as Christians, but we also need to be rebuked/corrected in a gentle way when we make mistakes, nurtured back, not left a broken wreck for weeks/months/decades, leaving someone in such a state in life is when Satan will work at his strongest. Preaching Christ with envy and strife has its place, sometimes a stubborn sinful heart, a heart of stone needs broken and Christ through the power of the Holy spirit will rebuild that heart and that person.

god bless

 

[K2K]

If Jesus Christ is our Lord then we must be serving Him which means listening to Him. So are the acts of kindness we do "Random"?

I mean, He has a purpose for what He asks us to do, right?

So I guess they could seem random, but they can't really be random because He is guiding us, right?

Jesus, when on earth, did and said only what the Father told Him, I He still does. He set the example for how we should live. And if I read the Bible I read about the wonderful things He did, but I never got the impression that what He did was "random", but rather that it all was planned out and done exactly like the Father wanted done.

I say this because I believe we are to live our lives by listening to our Lord and doing what He asks. Doing that does not produce random acts, so I personally could never think of them that way, though they might sometimes seem that way to me. So I hear Him tell me, 'go there' and then 'do that', or maybe 'say this', just like it is written 'My sheep hear my voice'. But if I say to Him, 'Let's take this perfume and sell it so we can give money to the poor', I might find out that I am doing the wrong thing. It might have been a good random thought that I had, but I am serving Him who speaks so I walk according to His plan.

 

[Michie]

Our own failures to love our neighbor — our own random acts of unkindness — can have a lasting negative effect on others. If we refuse to practice empathy, compassion, understanding, and kindness toward those around us, can we honestly call ourselves Christians in any meaningful sense? Are we evangelizing, or are we instead driving people out of the Church? We might congratulate ourselves on our knowledge of faith and dogma, but we should consider Saint Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians:

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.

We have it on the authority of Scripture: Faith without love is nothing except an empty cacophony of sadness. That sounds a lot like our world today.

Nearly every nation on earth is besieged with problems and various forms of unrest that seem to grow worse every day, but they all seem to originate in one common cause: we have failed to love. We have failed to love God; therefore, we have been unkind to neighbor. Perhaps we have forgotten that love of neighbor — and love of self, for that matter — extends from the love of God. But the inescapable truth is that love of God and love of neighbor are forever linked.

Because it is easy to lose sight of this fact, we need to restore our vision of who our neighbor is.

We have a choice. We can view others as existing merely for our own pleasure and utility, which is the basis of the question: What can he or she do for me? In our present inappropriate contentographic culture, there is little doubt that we are being overrun by this utilitarian view. This view is the springboard for random acts of unkindness.

But, true to the message of Romans 12:21, we can overcome unkindness with kindness. We must choose to view each person as the unique and wondrous handiwork of God that he or she is. We Christians are called to look at others, in the words of Frank Sheed, “not for what we can get out of them but for what God has put into them, not for what they can do for us but for what is real in them.” Sheed explains that loving others “is rooted in loving God for what He is.”

Accompanied by grace, that is the recipe for restoring charity and kindness — seeing each person as the unique creation of God. Each person around us is a being of inestimable value whom God has loved from all eternity. As St. Alphonsus Liguori reminds us, “Children of men, says the Lord, remember that I first loved you. You had not yet been born, the world itself did not exist, and even then I loved you.”

Regardless of every mistake you have ever made in your life, God has loved you from all eternity. In a world suffering from terrible unkindness, that is the encouraging message we need to convey — to friends, to family, to strangers. And who knows? Twenty years from now, maybe someone will come up to you and let you know what sort of powerful impact you had on her life.

 

[Victor in Christ]

Agape love leads to brotherly love. If you don't possess the first, you will never have the latter.

 

[K2K]

Rev 3:20 Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me.

Here is the thing - Jesus Christ, the Word of God, is just standing there knocking with His voice and trying to get our attention. So how do we miss Him and hearing His voice?

We know that only God, Jesus Christ is God the Son, is good. We also know the God is love, not us. So we seemingly at random times have this thoughts of kindness. I ask - where to they come from?

I, as a person, tend to be selfish. So is it natural for me to suddenly have there random thoughts of kindness. How is it those thoughts come from this selfish person that I am? I supposed I might give if I could get some fame or something else out of it. Yet somehow I conclude that I am such a good person that I randomly decide to do these kind acts. It's not all the time, but just some random thing I do. Why? Why would I do them randomly and not always or at least without some purpose which I know of?

Does it never occur to us that perhaps indeed Jesus Christ is indeed knocking with His voice so that sometimes it get through to me and I then sometimes act on it? That might explain the randomness of it and also why I don't know the purpose!

Maybe Jesus Christ really is standing their knocking with His voice but I am just not paying attention? Perhaps?