The blessings that come with life in a small town, or the absence of a town altogether, are many and rich, and I count the blessings in my life that have come courtesy of rural living among the choicest of all my blessings. Generally speaking, I have found that the fewer the people involved in any given event, the sweeter the experience. Rural living lends itself to a fairly high probability that most days will stay true to this creed. And although the common belief may be that country dwellers’ bliss is mostly dependent on a certain naivete that comes from a sheltered life, I would submit to you that the cracks in the shelter of life in the sticks sometimes allow a bitter cold to permeate an otherwise cozy existence.
As welcoming and warm-hearted as I have nearly always found my dear friends and neighbors to be, regardless of what remote part of America’s outback I have called my home, life in the idyllic countryside always comes with its own unique challenges, especially for kids who are still trying to work out exactly where their particular niche in life may lie. I’m fiercely proud of my rural upbringing – and prouder still of my children and what they, as products of the same lifestyle, have become. And I’m blessed each year to renew those youthful blessings as I spend several hours every day during the basketball season with the daughters of my rural southern Idaho home.
Along with the joy that comes with the memories and fresh, new experiences, however, is the occasional heartbreak that every life endures in some form or another, and there’s not much that I can think of that weighs heavier on the heart than watching the heartache of a kid who doesn’t quite fit in. That burden can be especially heavy in a small school or town where the opportunities to find friends to fit every style are fewer and further between than what you might find in more populated locales.
The awareness of sometimes still-smoldering regret is like a bitter bile on my mind when I think of the missed opportunities for kindness that litter my past. Too many times in my high school and younger years, I took the easy, well-trodden path and ignored the kid who maybe didn’t quite fit in. Even worse, there may have been an occasion or two when I was part of the cause of the torment. The sting of those memories became even more acute when I sent my kids off to school. I hated the thought that they might be either the cause or the object of adolescent cruelty. If there was any way I could have carried that load for them, I would have gladly packed it across a thousand desert miles.
Every day, at the beginning of basketball practice for the girls’ basketball team at Oakley High School, the coaches and players of the junior varsity and varsity teams gather around the big block O at center court. Part of that ritual includes a report of the previous day’s assigned “kindness.” Several of the girls will take a few seconds to tell their coaches and team what small act of kindness they performed for their mother or father or sibling or teacher or classmate or the school janitor. It’s an honored tradition that has become part of the identity of the program and the team, and although it may, at times, seem a bit forced and contrived, it fosters an awareness that has woven itself into the very fabric of the team culture and, more importantly, the lives of the girls who put it into the practice of their lives.
Kindness doesn’t always come easy. It’s sometimes uncomfortable. It sometimes invites ridicule. Oftentimes, the low road seems like it would be the preferred road. But kindness (or as it’s sometimes called, charity) “never faileth.” And when kindness is honestly and intentionally put into practice, it always enriches the lives of both the giver and the receiver.
As the chill that comes with the winter winds descends upon me every year, I can’t help but be reminded of another season and another small town, oceans and continents away from my home tucked away in the mountain valleys of the high desert of the Intermountain West. It was a small town, far removed from the hometown of a pair of worn-out travelers in desperate need of some kindness. And although they were greeted mostly with the apathy and cruelty of an uncaring world, a small, seemingly insignificant act of kindness offered perhaps by the wife of a nondescript innkeeper, in the form of a filthy barn, ushered in the most significant event in the history of the world. From that moment, and that tiny act of kindness, came He who would show all of mankind – all of us – the greatest, most significant act of kindness that would ever be performed; He who is willing to carry our every burden across a thousand desert miles.
May we all keep kindness in our hearts and share it at every opportunity.
Merry Christmas!
