Thrive In Five Faith Journal: May Prompts – Kindness

We all love it when people are kind to us and go the extra mile to make us feel special. Especially when you’re an essential employee at a hospital during a pandemic (Thank you everyone who supported the cause). Why do you think everyone loves Chick – Fil – A? The chicken sandwich is good, but the kindness that has been instilled into each of the employees makes the visits even sweeter. As we make our way through May, we will try to invoke the CFA mindset of kindness in our everyday interactions.

Subject: Kindness

I have a friend who runs a successful online boutique. She once told me that she wanted the experience at her boutique to be one that made people feel special so that they come back (not for more clothing, but for more of the experience). You know what her business has done? It has skyrocketed because people love the product, but more importantly, they love the owner who cares enough to be kind to each of her clients like a friend and not the next dollar. She remembers the faces and something about each of them whether they buy something or not. Her kindness is not lost on them and they typically return to support her. A little bit of kindness will go a long way (especially if someone is rude or disrespectful to you. They probably need it most).

Objective:

Since we’ve already created our template for what we are going to do each month, the task of copying prompts and setting up this month should be fairly easy. If you are finding this page first, check out my post on how to start journaling here, then pop back over to get the May prompts.

Use this optional prompt at the end of month. If you want to track any other memories, add them at the end of the month. This isn’t the primary focus, but it’s always fun to keep fun memories.Here are a couple of ideas for the end of the month recap:

• Perform a random act of kindness and write about how it made you feel
• Be kind to yourself and write kind words of affirmation for yourself
• Make a list of ways you can be kind to the people closest to you

As you reflect on kindness this month, here are a couple of scriptures that can help remind you of what God says about kindness.

Actionable Item:

The true measure of kindness is based on how kind we are to people that can do nothing for us. It’s simply wanting to help someone else. During the month of May, we tend to be very agreeable to our mothers or mother figures. This is awesome, but let’s try to extend that kindness/help beyond the mothers in our lives. Buy the Negative Nancy at work lunch and try to understand her story. Maybe she’s not so negative after all and really just lonely. Or for my Houston people, try to be more accommodating and forgiving for the overly aggressive driver (if you’re that driver, try to leave earlier so you can be more docile in your commute). Whatever you decide, remember that kindness is intentional.

Point of it all:

Kindness requires a certain amount of humility and patience, but more importantly some guidance from the Holy Spirit. Typically we think of kindness as being nice, but really it’s the same as loving. What would happen if we replaced our thoughts about being nice to really loving ourselves and the people in our lives? Look back at some of your February prompts and see how you can apply some of those ideas to your practice of being more kind. Ultimately, we want to be the type of people that are a pleasure to be around.