Sowers of Kindness

There is a lot of ugliness in this world.  There is the careless use of road sides as trash receptacles.  There are inner city neighborhoods which should have been abandoned a long time ago.  There are angry people who have promised to love one another shouting obscenities at each other over the heads of their children behind closed doors.  There are horrible wars, hungry people, and the aftermath of catastrophic disasters.  As beautiful as this world can be, there are also those things to be seen which are filled with such ugliness all we want to do is turn our head.   

The other day I witnessed two acts of ugliness which I have not been able to get out of my mind.  They seem to show up as constant re-runs whenever my mind pauses.  The first was an older man whose care for his slow moving walker dependent wife seemed framed by the attitude of do the best you can.  The second unforgettable ugliness was a father who verbally humiliated his ten year old son until the child finally crumpled in a mass of jerking tears on the sidewalk.  While being a parent is sometimes hard and being a full time caregiver is always hard, it is still impossible to justify the ugliness in plain view the other day.  

Just as the ugliness of evil seemed to be holding sway, the goodness of kindness and love came into view.  Kindness came into view as the eatery staff tended to the older woman as if she was their mother and it came into view again when the crumpled child was sought out and brought back to the game by another child who cared for him like a brother.  Kindness, gentleness, care, and love are in too short a supply these days.  We may not be able to do something about all the ugliness we see spread across our world, but we can offer the fruits of goodness to those who are neglected and crying in our midst.  To paraphrase a teaching of Jesus, the world is in need of more sowers of goodness and each one of us can be one today.