Be Kind to Those Who Aren’t Kind to You

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Be Kind to Those Who Aren’t Kind to You

And be kind to one another . . . —Ephesians 4:32 (NKJV)

Christmas is the season of good cheer, but it often becomes a season of stress . . . so much shopping, wrapping, cooking, baking, and visiting. Before you know it, people are losing patience, snapping at one another. It's easy to become unkind.

I'll never forget something my daughter told me a long time ago. She said that her goal was to learn to love or to treat with kindness, goodness, and mercy every single person she encountered who was unkind or ugly to her. She said, "That's my goal. I want to submit to God in my emotions and the way that I handle myself so that when I’m out in public and someone mistreats me, I respond with kindness."

She said, "One of the things that God has shown me that really helps is when someone is grouchy toward me, I can get angry and frustrated or I can think: I don't know what this person is going through. Maybe right now her back hurts terribly. Maybe this grumpy man is carrying a financial burden that feels too heavy for him. Maybe that woman's husband has just been told he's losing his job at the end of the week."

We don't know what's going on in people's lives.

Kindness will cause you to slow down and give people some space and some grace. Life was not meant to be the way it is today. We were not meant to live at the fast pace at which we live, with thousands of things coming at us at once.

I think we've lost sight of some important things in life and that we need to put kindness back on our priority lists!

Love Others Today: "Help me, Lord, to be especially kind to people who are not kind to me."

From the book Love Out Loud by Joyce Meyer.