geting serious

I usually try to avoid serious topics on this blog but this evening I have decided to share a devotion that I wrote recently.

Please Pass the Milk
by
Luci Foltz

I've been metaphorically wringing my hands for the last two weeks, wondering what can I do?  What should I be doing? 
MY days of protesting are long behind me.  Sit-ins are a dim, distant college memory. 

I truly thought back then, when I tried to imagine this far into the future, that racism would be a sad distant memory, that mixed marriages would be the norm, that the world would be on the way to being populated by coffee and cream skinned people.
I was so hopeful, and that hopefulness was fed by circumstances.  The black friends I met on campus (the first black people I had ever met) were bright, intelligent people looking forward to successful lives.  I graduated from college in 1965 and spent one year of my teaching career in Monticello, New York; a wonderful town in the Catskills that had been so thouroughly integrated for so many years that it gave me hope that this is how it would soon be everywhere.

But here and now, with the distant sounds of protest outside my windows, I find myself deeply saddened and wondering if things will ever really change. 
So I found myself praying the question what can I do now?  And the answer came "You can be kind."  Really God?  That doesn't seem like much."   And then another phrase slid through my mind. Consider 'the milk of human kindness.'  Who knew God quotes Shakespeare? 

I like to think I'm a kind person.  I'm always cheerful and friendly to people I meet in the hallways or on the elevators of my building.  I think I usually leave people smiling but with masks, who can tell? 
But when I think of the milk of human kindness, I think of milk flowing freely and unendingly.  Babies nurse greedly, never anticipating an end to the milk.  Teens inhale milk right from the jug and assume there will always be more.  Abundant milk, abundant kindness.  I think Jesus' idea of kindness was of the flowing milk variety.  Walk the extra mile, give him your shirt and your coat, turn the other cheek.  Jesus was God's great example of milk-flowing, over the top, intense kindness. 

I saw, on a recent news report, an excellent example of the kindness I'm talking about.  Security footage caught the image of a young man with a baseball bat approaching a plate glass window.  It looked like he had vandalism in mind. Suddenly he was surrounded, very quietly, by four people who hugged him, held him close, and waited for him to calm down.  No one yelled, no one was injured.  Just quiet kindness.  I can imagine Jesus saying "Hug, don't hit."

So what can we do now?  We can be kind, over and over again.  It may not seem like much, but like spilled milk, it will spread and spread and spread.