I’m not sure how it came to her attention, whether she noticed it in walking by or overheard it standing in line, but my daughter Hannah, in third grade, discovered that a boy in kindergarten had lost his first tooth. A first tooth is a big deal! Papa makes a big deal of it by giving his grandchildren a dollar. A dollar is a big deal to a little child! Hannah had a dollar on her, so she gave it to the boy in kindergarten. And a dollar wasn’t a dollar any more, a lost tooth wasn’t forgotten in the commotion of a school day, and a kindergartner experienced a small/big act of kindness.
Hannah-jae
Christians want to change the world – fast, because “time is short”, and radically, because boring is unacceptable (we think). But the world is changing. Rather, it is being changed: Jesus is on the move, sometimes overtly, sometimes subversively, but always on the move. We are saved into His Kingdom-on-the-move. He initiates, we respond. His resurrection power operates even as we hit the snooze button again. Then we get up, our lives-as-prayer asking, “What are You doing today? I want to be a part. By Your grace, in Your power, for Your glory, and out of love for You and others, I want to hear and follow, see and imitate.” But do we?
Sometimes it’s a dollar out of kindness. Sometimes it’s not. Being kind is more child-like than we like to become, and more powerful than we’d care to admit. Not because we don’t believe it, but because we’d rather be touring the world than wandering the halls, leading the line instead of keeping up with it, working a miracle and preaching a sermon than discovering a missing tooth and giving away a dollar.
Yet the love of Christ compels us to do a lot of things: wonderful things and strange things, obvious things and subtle things, visible things and invisible things, impossible things and mundane things – all of them empowered by Him, and each of them a big deal to Him and to those whom He calls us to notice.
Recent Comments