Rewind-Be Kind

So the Lord and I have this..thing. Well, the Lord and my husband and I have another thing where we’ll walk into a store, the movie theater, anywhere, and many times no one will be in line, so we walk right to the front, and almost immediately afterward there will be a line several people long behind us. Can’t even count how many times that’s happened.

But the thing that the Lord and I have is that more times than not He’ll give me a parking space right up front. Either someone has just left before I pulled around the corner or someone is just coming out and I wait happily while the Lord provides “my spot.” I pull in, smile and tell Him thank you.

But something different happened the other day. As I rounded the corner to start my hunt for a space down the lane, an older man, who was just corralling his shopping cart, looked at me and held up a finger to stop me. I and my eternal optimism thought, “Oh no, what does he want?”

So I cracked the window to find out why in the world he was stopping me. He said that he was just leaving and I could have his spot. Guess where it was? Yep, right up front. Okay, aside from feeling like a bit of a jerk for immediately thinking he was just someone who was going to annoy me, I also felt grateful to know that somewhere, someone still had the decency to go out of their way to be kind. And it was cool that God had found a whole new way of giving me the parking space up front.

Then I started thinking, “When was the last time I went out of my way to show kindness to someone, especially a stranger-unprompted, unasked for, out-of-the-blue kindness?” Hm. It’s been a while. Not exactly my comfort zone to go up to someone I don’t know and initiate conversation. But, as I do every now and then, I will ask God to give me an “assignment,” and show me someone whom I can help. Maybe I’ll have the opportunity to bless someone with my special right-up-front parking space. I’ll get back to you on that one.

"Jesus said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.'" (Matthew 22:37-39)