Instead, be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another, just as God in Christ also forgave you.
Ephesians 4:32 (NET)
The Ground Under Kindness
Their grandmother sends them down for the beans, two jars, because her knees won’t take the cellar stairs twice in one day. It’s noon upstairs, and down there the air is still April. The older boy is eleven and knows which shelf things live on. The younger one is seven and puts his hand on everything he goes past, the preserves and the chest freezer with the hasp on it. He takes a jar down with one hand, and then the jar is in pieces on the floor and the beans are rolling under the bottom shelf. His brother says a word that would cost him his evening upstairs. The younger one says sorry twice, fast, and gets down to pick up the big pieces with his fingers.
By the time they have the rest of it into the dustpan the whole thing is over, and neither of them will remember it at supper.
Bitterness, rage, brawling, slander, every form of malice: Paul wants all of it out. In its place he asks for kindness and compassion toward one another, and for forgiving each other, and he gives one reason for both. In Christ, God forgave you. The forgiving he’s after moves between people who have to keep living near each other, and it stands on what God already did, at his own cost.
Kindness toward a person who has taken something from you doesn’t come up out of the ground on its own. I look forward to the days when it comes easy, and there are more of those now than there used to be. Paul says where the kindness comes from. A man who has been forgiven a real thing by God has somewhere to stand when he’s asked to do a real thing himself, and without that he’s working off his own patience, and patience gives out around four in the afternoon.
Upstairs their grandmother has the bread out and doesn’t ask what the noise was. “Two,” she says, when the older one comes up with one jar. The second jar comes up the cellar stairs against the younger one’s stomach, held there with both hands.
A Prayer to Remember
Make me kind today to the person it will cost me, Lord, and let it be the real thing by the time it reaches them. You forgave me in Christ, and it cost you, and I’ve got nothing else to ask on.
In Jesus’ name I pray. Amen.
