The second kindness I encountered this same day began with a prayer request.  A friend's son was in desperate need of a wheelchair following a brutal gang attack which necessitated surgery to fix a broken hip.  The son had no insurance and was too old to be covered by his father's insurance.  He was unable to afford the purchase of a wheelchair and didn't know where to turn.   Obviously prayers were ongoing for spiritual, emotional, physical healing in addition to comfort for this family, as well as the perpetrators of this crime.  Our entire church was praying.  Within less than an hour, we had an email from our church saying that one of our members (who we often don't get to see at church) immediately brought a wheelchair to the church for our friend's son to use.  It's not unusual for most any of our church members to rise up in aid for another, but what called to my heart in this case was recognizing the great effort made by this particular member.  He stepped out of his comfort zone to help a stranger.  I think this is where the lesson resides for the rest of us.  Often, kindness asks for sacrifice.  Sometimes this sacrifice may be something as seemingly simple as leaving the safety of one's home.  Sometimes the sacrifice may be as difficult as putting aside your own fears to comfort someone else.   Sometimes kindness asks for us to leave preconceived ideas on the shelf, and by doing so, we usually learn something new about ourselves. 

I decided to  create two separate blogs on a combination of kindnesses that came to my attention all in one day.  First, a friend/co-worker shared with the events of her morning sending her youngest child off to her first day of school.  Her daughter caught the bus just fine and my friend was getting ready to leave her home for work at our office downtown.  As she was preparing to leave for Nashville, she noticed a neighbor boy waiting outside of his home like he was looking for the schoolbus.  She decided to put her "mom" hat back on and pulled up her car to ask him if he was waiting for the bus.  When he replied, "yes," she let him know that he had missed it by about 5 minutes.  When she checked to see if his parents were home to bring him to school, he told her they weren't.  Well, again, she put on her "mom" hat and told him to hop in and she would bring him.   She shared with me that he was so obviously relieved to have help that was completely unexpected.  One of the things that makes this such a sweet act of kindess was that my friend had to drive another 5-10 miles out of way to get this child to school in the opposite direction from our work.   What would the rest of us do?  I can imagine myself in the same situation and I'm saddened to say that I don't know my neighbors well enough to help in this way.  Yes, we visit from time to time when we're conveniently outside at the same time doing yard work, but I don't know even their children's names.  In this day and age, if a child doesn't know someone, they obviously shouldn't get into a car with them.  So, simply not knowing more about my neighbor becomes a barrier to helping if they need it.  Is this by my choice?  Is this by theirs?  Are we so busy creating communities far from where we live, i.e. church, work, friend networks, etc., that we miss out on community at home?  When did we move away from knowing everyone who lived near us?  When we consider kindnesses towards our neighbors, I hope we're able to also consider how positively this will impact us down the road.