Kindness

When I do my 3 yr old daughter’s hair in the morning, she sits on the counter in the bathroom and looks into the mirror. I tell her how beautiful she is and how beautiful her hair is. This is because she has a lot more hair than I ever had even at 5 or 6 years old! But then I ask her, “What is the prettiest thing about you?” and her learned response is, “Jesus in my heart.”

Now let’s rewind to when I first got married. I was an eager wife trying to please her new husband. I would ask him what is the one thing he desired out of me and he would answer, “Kindness”. Well, I just thought this was absurd so I tried a lot of other things. Being sexy, cooking good meals, cleaning the house, buying him presents, etc. Which he liked all those things but when I would ask him again what is the one thing he wanted out of me more than anything else, he would respond, “Kindness”.

It took me a few years to believe him. And then it took me another couple of years to figure out exactly what that meant and how to go about doing it. It’s hardest to be kind to the people you live with day in and day out. To use manners and prefer one another over each other even when you are tired. My husband is good about this. He says excuse me in the kitchen when he needs to get past me instead of bumping me out of his way. He asks if I would like to have the last piece of pizza in the box. My guess is, he was raised like this and had a good example at home. Thank you to my mother and father in law for modeling this at home.

But more than that, my husband desires kindness from my heart and words. He wants me to talk to him with sweet words and a kind tone. He wants me to express that my heart’s desire is to see him succeed and encourage him to do so in every area of life with faith, work, home and health. When I am acting and speaking from a kind heart towards him, he looks at me and smiles. It makes me irrisistably beautiful and attractive to him. He also wants to hear me speak kindly about others and treat other’s with kindness. This makes him very proud to call me his wife.

But how can we muster up some more kindess in our lives? Jesus in my heart. It is one of the fruits of the Spirit in Galatians 5 that we need to grow in if we are in a relationship with Christ. It is what marks a life different than another. By our words and actions we will be known. It might take me a lifetime to work on but I want kindness to be what my family thinks of when they think of me.

“What is desired in a (wo)man is kindness.” Proverbs 19:22a