Being Nice – Sunday Thought For The Day

The following is an excerpt from my devotional book, “Alone With Jesus.”

Being nice is not cost prohibitive. I will frequently say to someone I am corresponding with or that I have been speaking with to, “do something nice for a stranger today.”

But what exactly does that mean? Do we know how to be nice to a stranger? It’s not complicated and it requires nothing of us but to acknowledge a stranger. But what does that mean?

We live in a culture in which we hurry by people consciously oblivious of them. Oftentimes we avoid making eye contact with people if we can do so for any one of a plethora of reasons. We brush by people and frequently ignore people because that’s what we do. They’re not like us or they are homely or they are homeless and the list goes on.

Being nice to a stranger is sometimes simply smiling and saying hello and genuinely meaning it. Being nice to a stranger can be as simple as holding the door open for someone and acknowledging them as we do. Something as simple as sincere thank you can make another person’s day.

We do not know what burdens or sadness a person may be experiencing at any given moment and sometimes that random act of kindness can be a real blessing to someone.

Sharing of our resources with a homeless person may cost us only the change we drop in their cup but for them it can mean the difference between a meal and a place to stay, and going hungry and sleeping on the street.

Are there times that we give to a homeless person and they take the money and spend unwisely? Of course there are. But if we are giving in the name of He who provides for us that isn’t necessarily our concern. I know a pastor who shared that a homeless woman once approached him and he took her into a convenience store and bought her and her children food.

Scriptures make clear that Christians do not live for themselves, they live to show forth Christ and too further His kingdom.

I attend a small church that, I refer to as the church at the “well of Bethesda.” I refer to it as such because we minister to the people that sadly, many other churches will not. John 5:3 tells us that at the pool: “…lay a great multitude of impotent folk, of blind, halt, withered…” Christ ministered to a man at that pool. If we do not minister to persons like this who will? It is easy to give money for someone else to do it but I contend that Christ set the example of doing it Himself. Should we not do same? We welcome the castoffs of society in and treat them as warmly as we do one another.

The world has become an uncaring insensitive place, but that is not how Christians are to behave.

If we say Christ is our Savior, then we are to live the examples He set. So I encourage you to do something nice for a stranger today. As we are told in Hebrews 13:2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

READ:
Hebrews 13:1-3
1 Let brotherly love continue.
2 Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.
3 Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body.