Initial Ponderings on Kindness

If you read my resolutions post recently, the you've already heard briefly of my heart's desire to learn to be more genuinely kind. Lately, I've been doing a bit of pondering about what this really means. But the more I ponder it, the more I begin to wonder how feasible something like learning to be kind might be.

The trouble, I'm finding? We live in a broken world. The model of kindness doesn't really work here. Think about it. Who "gets ahead" in this world? Driven, manipulative, cut-throat people get ahead. They are CEOs, leaders. They are rich, successful, powerful. Where do nice people end up? Dead last. Nice people get trampled. 

Think about it. People that are kind generally get taken advantage of. If I am kind and offer my money to an organization, my name ends up on some list and I get asked ten thousand times for money. If I offer my help on a project at work, I get asked to do a few more, or worse, I'm expected to continue to do nice things all the time. Suddenly, I find myself drowning in all the nice things I'm doing while also failing to do all the things I should be doing. 

But if I was truly genuinely kind, would this bother me? It shouldn't, right? If my heart was in the right place about the kind things I do, then being walked on a little shouldn't hurt my feelings. But, facts are facts. Being taken advantage of does bother me. I feel like I'm always being burned. 

Enter, the Jesus example. His heart was kind. He loved sinners, weirdos, children. He felt compassion on the sick and injured. But He wasn't always Mr. Nicey Nice. Off the top of my head, I can recount examples of Jesus throwing things in the temple, asking the healed not to tell of His works, attempts to remove Himself from hoards of people (to pray, to sleep, on a hill, in a boat...). I can only imagine these must have been Jesus' intentional choices to not be completely overrun, trampled. A genuine heart of kindness is not a blind or foolish heart.

I know I'm not done wrestling with this. How did Jesus decide who to heal and who to walk away from? When to teach and when to rest? When to turn the other cheek and when to utilize a little righteous anger? When to hang with the group and when to take a moment for Himself? 

To be honest, I'm not really sure what I've learned in this quick and dirty review of Jesus' moments of not-kindness. There is much seeking to be done...which probably means a little less talking and a lot more listening, seeking after the kind heart of God.