Small Kindness in Times of Crisis
“If you can’t do great things, do small things in a great way.” — Napoleon Hill
We live in the age of “go big or go home”. Right now, we just live in the second half of that. If you’ve noticed, nobody’s all that impressed with celebrity status these days. NBA superstars have been sat down and famous celebrities are now just like the rest of us: hunkered down in their homes trying to stay safe and healthy. Nurses and grocery clerks, mailmen, and UPS drivers are being heralded as heroes.
Illness and economic crisis have a way of leveling the playing field for everyone. And suddenly we’re no longer interested in who the highest paid sports star is or who wore the dress better.
We’re touched by small kindnesses in our local communities: neighbors sharing toilet paper, bags of groceries left on porch stoops, drive-by birthday parties, stuffed bears waving from decks and porches, and simple messages left on sidewalks by kids and teens.
I have been living with these small acts of kindness my whole life. Small in gesture they are large in love and have sustained me more than the giver will ever know.
Sometimes words are the kindness we need to heal, break curses, or move on, but acts without words are heavy in weight. They linger like a sharp memory in our minds, we feel the emotion of how they touched us, and we wonder if the giver can ever know how much their simple gesture meant. We bless them each time we remember and carry them with us.
Nurse Elsie making Ryans’ crib every morning
I’ll never forget her name. Elsie was one of our favorite nurses. She was young, so young, and so sweet. She couldn’t heal my son of biliary atresia, she hadn’t performed the seven-hour surgery that saved his life, but she did her great thing for me.
Every morning when she was on duty she made Ryan’s crib because she knew I liked it to be neat. She carefully tucked the corners and folded his blankets and arranged the baby mirror and the few toys he had. It was a small semblance of normalcy in what felt like a world of chaos and madness. She marked my heart with her small act of kindness.
The doctor who patted my head in the ER
He was an elderly gentleman, gray-haired and soft-spoken. My arm was in shambles, completely dislocated at the elbow. I was frightened, in shock, and in pain. He could not do much for me until the x-rays came back to determine if there were any shattered bones.
I moaned under the morphine and worried how I would ever use my hand again as it grew numb and swollen from lack of circulation. Sensing my distress and fear, he patted me on the head — the way one would do to a small child — and said, “I know you’re in pain. I promise to take care of it as soon as I can.”
It’s not his words that stay with me, it’s that grandfatherly pat on the head. And considering how I looked and felt at that time, I find it such a gesture of love.
I doubt he realized what he was doing, it was one of those automatic gestures that humans use when they want to do more than they can. There I sat, my hair a tangled wet mess (I had fallen in the shower and arrived at the hospital looking like a wet rat), my arm dangling like a mangled Barbie doll arm from my body, and this doctor reaches out and pats me on the head to comfort me.
How can I ever forget that kindness?
Warm meals in the hospital
Sometimes it was Boston Market or a burger from a drive-thru but a warm meal for a sad heart in a hospital room does wonders! What one may not realize is that when your child is a patient, they get meals but as a parent, you do not.
Our son was an infant who spent sometimes two to three weeks at a time in the hospital. We never left him alone. A warm meal meant the world to us at that time. My sister-in-law, in my mind, wears a small halo around her head in this memory and a carries bag of food in her hands.
The alpaca store and the worry doll
Recently I visited a small town in the mountains of Colorado and stopped in at a gift shop that sold Alpaca wear. I started talking with the owner of the store and we landed on the topic of stress. We exchanged war stories about working brutal hours and the devastation that stress wrought on our bodies and how both of us have opted for a simpler, calmer way of life (hence the Alpaca store in the mountains!).
In a simple, impulsive gesture he bounced out from around the sales counter and said, “I have something for you!” It was Christmas time and he removed a small item from the store’s decorative Christmas tree.
A small worry doll, as he called it. He explained that the Peruvian people create these worry dolls that they whisper their concerns to and the worry doll carries them off, relieving the pray-er of her fears and concerns.
I graciously accepted his gift and pinned it to my hat, close to my mind where I tend to manufacture most of my worries. His additional advice resulted in one of the best memories that I’ll carry with me forever. I write about that in the Carousel of Happiness.
The ‘I’m going to miss you’ hug
I used to teach first grade. It’s the best grade to teach; students come in as babies and leave readers and writers. And they love so freely!
Toward the end of the school year, one of my students, with the vulnerability only children can embrace, said, “Mrs. Gallagher, I’m really going to miss you.”
“I know, Jonathan,” I replied, “I’ll miss you too.”
“No, I don’t think you understand how much I am going to miss you,” he responded.
Inspiration jumped in and helped me with this one and I said, “Well, why don’t you show me how much you will miss me?”
And to that Jonathan threw his little arms around my waist and squeezed with all his might. You can be sure that is a small gesture I’ll never forget.
Collective kindness can change the world
I’ve recently learned about something called collective consciousness. It’s the power of individuals when they are in agreement. It’s one reason Jesus said,
For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them. — (Matthew 18:20, ESV)
The impact of a few may cause us to stargaze for a while — Mr. Billionaire donates two million dollars to help flood victims, Mrs. Actress goes viral on Twitter and awakens awareness about social injustice, Famous Sports Star visits injured victims in hospital and brightens their day — but it’s the collective small gestures of kindness that change the world and push back against the darkness.
The world is transformed and lives are touched when ordinary people do ordinary things with extraordinary love.
Never, ever underestimate what your smile might mean to someone’s day, what your sacrifice of time can do to help the weary parent of a sick child hold on to hope for one more hour, or what a simple, unfiltered gesture can mean to a lonely or frightened person.
This story is published in Koinonia — stories by Christians to encourage, entertain, and empower you in your faith, food, fitness, family, and fun.
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