Monday, October 16, 2017

Moonflowers

Random,  it feels too reckless.
I like planned, purposed and beautifully presented.
If I can build a list, diagram a plan or jot out the pros and cons, I am in, 110%.

Random never feels that way.
That is why when my family got the notion of random acts of service, I insisted we retitle the activity. I searched for something different,  something I could better manage.  We called them moonflowers.

Moonflowers, the brilliant white flower that blooms in the darkness.  My oldest daughter was named by her Russian mother after this very plant.  

I remember researching her name.  I remember how dark our days seemed waiting for her,  knowing she lived and breathed and existed half way around the world and she knew nothing of us.  I remember the long nights praying and crying and sometimes yelling at God for the constant of delays.

I remember the feeling of complete emotional exhaustion after 36 hours of travel to finally meet her face to face.  I remember how her shaved head felt nestled against my neck.  Beauty out of the darkest of journeys,  my moonflower.

Kindness, random or not, seems conspicuously absent from almost every aspect of life.  Kindness appears on the television news the last 30 seconds of a broadcast to keep us coming back.  We crave it.    It is tiny bites of sweetness amidst a seemingly bitter and cruel world.
Perhaps that is why kindness is catching fire.  

Kindness does something to us, it is the ripening of the fruit of the Spirit.  It is the balm to weary souls who know Jesus and a calm, quiet invitation to those who do not.

The fact that we call these opportunities random unsettles me.  I don’t believe there is ever a day, ever a moment void of the Holy Spirit.  Therefore, is there ever a reason, ever a circumstance where kindness is not a choice.

I believe we serve a very intentional God, one that pours out in abundance ways in which we can reflect Him.  It is not the occasions that are random.  It perhaps is our reaction.

This Holy God that set into motion freedom has allowed us to choose our reaction, our path, our words, our tone dozens of times each day.
It is not the act that is random, rather our reaction.

There is the choice to see,  the choice to hear, the choice to step in, the choice to edify, the choice to encourage, the choice to stand up.

Over a thousand minutes in each day, but it is in the split second that kindness is decided.  The Holy Spirit, the gentleman that causes our hearts to tug towards something supernatural.  
We pursue this holiness knowing it is what we are built for.  Ours to lay another brick on a road to something better and perhaps harder.  

We suddenly stand out.  We can discover ourselves quite alone in our decision to not follow a crowd, to not pursue the route to popularity and to not value those things that set us in front. 

In the inverse economy of God, it is the servant, the forgiver, the forgotten that are remembered. The greatest gifts are unwrapped by the one that gives him or herself away by little acts of hidden.    Moonflowers.

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