Kind Is the One I Was Not Born With

Twice this year, from two people who have no connection to each other, and both times the same word.

The first was in March, from somebody who reports to her, in an actual conversation about an actual thing, and it was said carefully and it was said with an apology round it. The second was in September, from her sister, in a car, at speed, without any apology at all.

Hard.

She is thirty nine and she is very good at what she does. She is accurate, which not everybody is. She is fast. She does not miss things and she does not let things go that should not be let go, and three of the five people at that counter would tell you privately that the department works because she is in it.

And two people this year said hard, and she cannot argue with either of them.

That is the part. She has gone over both conversations, several times, looking for the flaw in the case, and there is not one. She was right in March. She was right in the car in September. And she was hard, both times, and she knows exactly what they mean, and she can feel it in herself when it happens, about half a second after it is too late.

Kindness is on the list. It is the fifth one, or the sixth depending on which translation you learned it in, and she learned it at eight years old and it has been sitting there ever since like a subject she failed.

She has tried. Nobody would guess that, because trying at this is invisible. She has spent whole meetings deliberately not saying a correct thing. She has practiced sentences in a parking lot. She has a rule about not answering an email inside twenty minutes, and it has helped, and it has not changed anything at all about what she is.

The light in that office comes through the west wall at about half past four and turns the whole floor gold, and she is standing at the counter with her glasses in her hand while somebody fails to work the coffee machine.

You have your word. Somebody said it and you could not argue with it and you have been carrying it since. There is one sentence in Ephesians about kindness that most people quote as a command, and the second half of it is the half that changes everything.

The supply is in the same sentence

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is exactly where somebody normally prescribes. Do one kind thing a day. Practice softening your language. Ask a colleague for feedback monthly. I am not going to do that. She has already run harder versions of all of it, privately, for years, and prescribing another would tell a woman who has practiced sentences in a parking lot that the problem is that she has not tried.

Paul writes: And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you (Ephesians 4:32).

Everybody stops at the comma. Be kind one to another. Yes, it is an imperative, and it is real, and it is not being softened here.

Now read the rest of the sentence, because Paul did not put it there for balance. Even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you. The standard and the supply are in the same clause. The kindness being asked for is not generated from a person's temperament; it is the passing on of a thing already received, and the measure of it is what has already been done to them.

You have been asked to hand on something rather than to produce it. That is not me weakening the command; Ephesians 4:32 makes the even as the ground of the be ye, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter put the receiving before the giving inside one sentence.

And notice the word between them: tenderhearted. It is a physical word, about the inward parts, and it is not something a person decides. A temperament does not get argued into being tender. It gets made tender, and Paul puts it in the passive company of a thing that was done to them.

And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.Ephesians 4:32

Right is not the opposite of kind

Now the thing she has quietly concluded, because it is doing more damage than either conversation.

She has come to believe that being right and being kind are in competition, and that she is constitutionally on one side of it. That is why she has spent whole meetings deliberately not saying a correct thing: she thinks the only currency she has to pay for kindness is accuracy.

Nothing in Ephesians 4 supports that. The same chapter tells them to speak the truth in love (Ephesians 4:15), which puts both in one instruction and does not treat them as a trade.

You were never asked to be less accurate in order to be kinder. Ephesians 4:15 says speaking the truth in love, and the truth is not the thing being reduced; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) does not require a woman to get things wrong in order to be gentle about them.

This is yours right now, standing at a counter in the gold: a kindness that comes down from what was done for you. Ephesians 4:32 supplies the measure in the same clause as the command; the Spirit who inspired that line did not leave the supply out.

What she felt half a second too late

Let me stay with that detail, because it is the most hopeful thing in this whole article and she has read it as the worst.

She feels it about half a second after it is too late. Every time. She knows precisely what she has just done and she cannot get to it in time.

A woman with no kindness in her does not feel that. There is no half second. The half second is the thing itself, arriving, and arriving slightly behind the machinery of thirty nine years, and what it proves is not absence, it is that something is there and is not yet quicker than the habit.

You have something in you that is already arriving, just not yet in time. Philippians 1:6 says He who has begun a good work in you will perform it, and begun is past tense and performing is continuous; the Holy Spirit who carried that into the letter described a thing in progress rather than a thing awaited.

Fruit is not output, and an office is where the difference shows. Output would be a quarter with no incidents, which she can produce by force and which will cost her more than it returns. Fruit is what grows on a person who stays attached, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. On the walk to the station you already take, tell Him one true thing about the conversation in the car with nothing asked for and nothing resolved. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody assesses that, and it will not appear in a review.