Leadership Thought: The Language the Deaf Can Hear and the Blind Can See

Dear Friends,

Last night at our Grief Share meeting, our leader commenced our meeting with a wonderful sharing question. She asked each of us to share a kindness that had made a difference in our life.

One of our members shared how for three months a friend had called every day to check up on her after her husband had died. As each of us shared personal examples of some kindness we had experienced, I was struck by how many of those examples were so simple and so small and easy to perform. Yes, it doesn’t take a lot of time or effort to perform an act of kindness that can touch another’s life.

It has been said that “kindness it the language the deaf can hear and the blind can see,” and I would add that everyone can feel.

If you add the letter ‘d’ to the word kin, you have the word kind. To treat someone kindly is to treat them as ‘kin. Kindness is the natural grace that flows from sharing a kinship with another.

 When Paul admonished the Ephesian church to “be kind to one another,” he was simply asking them to accept one another as kindred souls in Christ who makes us one with each other.

The great theologian, Augustine was won to Christ, not by solid theological arguments, but by the genuineness of his friend Ambrose. Of his influence, Augustine wrote, “I began to love him, not at first as a teacher of the truth, which I despaired of finding in Thy church, but as a fellow creature who was kind to me.”

“If patience is love waiting, then kindness is love acting,” Simple and easy to offer, kindness is one of the clearest expressions of love that one can offer.

Much of our Savior’s ministry was centered on showing kindness to other people, usually to those who might least expect or deserve it.

He has given us plenty of examples of kindness while encouraging us to do the same “to the least of these,” for he saw kindness as the highest brand of service we could offer him.

Paul tells us “Love is kind.” Kindness is simply “love in work clothes,” and everyone can perform it.

Tucked away in my file cabinet and dated 5/6/63’ are these words I scribbled on a three by five post card: “If I pass through this world, but once, and if there is any kindness I can show, or any good thing I can do, let me do it now…… Let me not defer or neglect it- for I shall not pass this way again.”

I don’t remember where I was when I copied these words 61 years ago, but hopefully in these intervening years I have done my best to live them, and I hope you will too.

Yours faith and friendship,

Tom