Pause for Thought

I have gone on record recently for not understanding a lot of the adverts that we see on television, especially the ones to do with perfumes and cars. I am not always taken by some of the supermarket adverts, but I do like the more recent Tesco one. I hasten to add that this is not because I have shares in Tesco or that I worked for Tesco when I was at school and in the holidays when I was at college training to be a teacher. The reason that I liked it was that it used a woman doing a random act of kindness to her neighbours.

The woman takes her Tesco delivery at the same time as her neighbours arrive home with their new born baby from hospital. You then get clips of her carrying out her daily routine around her home, but the sound you hear is that of the neighbours new born crying and crying. It then shows the woman cooking a mushroom stew before knocking her neighbours front door. The young woman answers the door and seeing her neighbour automatically starts to apologise for the noise of the baby as they have been unable to settle her down. The neighbour stops her and says that she thought they might like the stew she had cooked. The young woman wells up with emotion and declares that it is so kind of her. The advert closes with the young woman eating the stew whilst her husband holds a now restful baby.

Random acts of kindness are not new, but there is a school of thought that thinks that a random act of kindness can cause a chain reaction of kind deeds throughout the day. An example of this is when June and I went to the supermarket the other day. As I locked the van up, she was looking in her purse to get a pound coin for the trolley when a women approached and gave June a pound coin saying she was a member of the passing on club (she had been given the pound by someone else and told to pass it on when she had finished her shopping). So dutifully when we had finished our shopping June passed the pound coin on to another shopper giving the explanation she had been told.

It is strange that during lock down when you met people in those opportunities you had to escape from the house people seemed more pleasant and polite to each other eager to talk as they had few opportunities to meet and talk with anyone other than their household. Also, people were in general kinder to each other and more prepared to help each other out. Now we are out of the lock down, people seem to have lost the urge to talk and in some sense be kind to each other.

If we look at Christ’s ministry it is full of acts of kindness that he did for people who were usually strangers to him. Christ’s followers were told to take up their cross and follow him, which still applies to us all today. So if we follow Christ we take on board his teachings and let the way he lived his life be the example by which we lead ours. Christ said that the two most important commandments were firstly, to love God with all our heart, with all our soul and with all our mind as this was the greatest of all commandments. The second is to love your neighbour as you love yourself. Who is our neighbour? Everyone we meet, is our neighbour. So, I would like to urge us all to consider being Christ like and try to do an act of kindness at least once a day if not more frequently. This will be a good starting point for us each day to base our discipleship on.

John Underhill