treat people with kindness.

If you spend more than five minutes with me, you probably know what a concert junkie I am. This year was supposed to be a big concert year for me for a lot of reasons, but especially one name: Sir Harry Styles. Harry is known for a lot of things, but especially his motto: treat people with kindness. Over the last few months, we’ve seen a lot of things… from soccer moms fighting over toilet paper, people stabbing each other with wine bottles over cases of water, to the prominent cases of Ahmaud, Breonna and George… and those are just the highlights.

My little brother and I had a discussion a few weeks ago about the golden rule. Maybe you remember this one? It goes about like this: treat others as you want to be treated. In other words, treat people with kindness. Down here in the South, we have this habit of doing things that are sometimes more acts of passive aggressiveness than genuine kindness. If you’re not from around here, “bless your heart” is a lot less sugary sweet than you might think. So many times, what we try to pass off as kindness is just deflection. When you say “how are you?”, what you expect to hear is “fine.” For anyone to answer truthfully can be an annoyance. So why do we ask? We assume we are moving in kindness, but I would like to reframe that thought process.

We have to move past superficial ideas of kindness towards genuine acts of love. If your idea of kindness is loosely formed, let’s look at some concrete ways that Christ treated people with kindness during His time on Earth.

• Water into wine: He saved this couple from the embarrassment of running out of wine at their wedding. While this may not seem like a big deal to you, this would have had significant cultural implications for them and their families.

• Raising Jairus’s daughter to life: “Little girl, wake up!” Death is traumatic. But it’s even more traumatic when it’s a child, for unknown reasons. Jesus could have allowed her to pass, but instead he said: “Little girl, wake up!”

• Feeding the 5,000: I feel like this one is pretty self-explanatory. People were hungry. It was hot (Israel is HOT, y’all). Jesus cared for their temporary need of hunger as much as He did for their eternal soul.

• Samaritan woman at the well: This woman was a social outcast. That’s why she was at the well at a time when she was sure no one else would be. What’s more, Jews did not hang out with Samaritans. The prejudice was deep between those two groups. Jesus treated her with respect and gentleness. This was unheard of, completely.

The point is that our kindness has to come from a real place. Jesus cared deeply for every person He met. He asked us to serve each other in love, and to do that sometimes we truly need supernatural kindness. We won’t always get along with everyone, but it matters that we choose kindness and love over hateful words. Apply that rule to your social media as much as you do to in-person interactions. Next time you speak or type or post, before you push it into the world forever, pause and ask this: Am I treating others with Christ-like kindness? It won’t always be easy, but anything worth doing rarely is. Here’s to kindness. #TPWK