It’s amazing how quickly we forget. One of the churches I worked with in 2020 decided to distribute daffodils to church folk as a small gesture to show that the church family remembered them. I thought that this was a lovely idea, so each time we went to the supermarket, we bought some small pot plants, then early in the morning when most sensible folk were still fast asleep, my daughter and I visited the homes of folk from one of my other churches, left a plant on the doorstep and put a card through the letterbox saying that the plant was a gift from the church and to remember that we still cared about them.
This was the smallest of gestures, but six years on, I still remember the joy of secretly delivering those plants. Over the course of about five weeks we delivered around thirty plants and the most wonderful thing was, nobody knew who was doing it, until about the final week when we were spotted by one of our few church folk who got up early to go to work, spotted us and we were busted.
The whole experience reminded me that sometimes we can get as much joy out of doing kindnesses for others than we can ever do by being on the receiving end.
This was just one of the examples of how people looked after one another as we shared in what was a difficult, challenging and sometimes frightening few months; a time when small acts of kindness helped vulnerable people to cope with loneliness and isolation.
You might be one of those who lent a helping hand during those days, or maybe you were on the receiving side of somebody else’s kindness.
In our troubled world we need more small acts of kindness.