08-12 GIfts of Kindness

My grandmother was a God-fearing woman, but more than that, she was a woman that when she spoke you listened, and she rarely said things twice. God forbid that you did not listen, or failed to heed her spoken word. The remembrance of her as I grew older was one that taught me a great deal about life and social graces. She was gracious, kind, generous, and loving. But as a child, in those years of testing and defiance, she was a general with an armament of all sorts of things to get your attention. Looking back on my life with her, I’d do so with a smile on my face.

I would not be the man I am today, had it not been for her oversight about life and what she gave to me. She was definitely a nurturer of the heart. As kids, we might not have seen her that way then, but we sure do now. And just what was it about her that we wanted to spend more time with during those formative years? I laugh lovingly just at the thought about it now. My grandmother was the mother of three daughters. Her oldest daughter, my mother, was from her first marriage. My mother never really knew her biological father since he was killed in World War I when she was a young girl.

My mother and her two half-sisters were raised by the second husband of my grandmother. In those years, when my grandmother raised her daughters, women were mainly focused on the home, and the man of the house really did what he wanted. Times were tough, and people stayed together in support of the family in more cases than what would happen today. So it was with my grandmother. The stepfather of my mother and biological father to the two sisters created a dysfunctional living environment filled with abuse and hardships. My grandmother over these years, to make things sane for their environment, stepped up to the challenge of assuming as much of the head of household role as she could.

Not living during that time, I can only imagine the will it took for her to take on this role, and the implications it had, not only on her but within the social community around her. While a lot of the abuse and hardships had already ingrained themselves into the daughters and my grandmother, she made the best of what she had and took control over this over time. As my grandmother grew older and moved, the role of head of household actually shifted from my grandfather to my grandmother. I would swear on a stack of bibles that this is where she turned into a military general.

The daughters grew up and began to find their own way in life. Each ended up not finishing school and getting married to find the life support they needed. Each of the three daughters married a man no different than that of their father, my grandfather. There is truth in the statement that we will attract to us exactly what you are thinking about. In conversation with my mother and her sharing about her sisters, the choice they each took was to find a way out of the abuse and hardship, instead of dealing with it and finding their own life.

In doing so, their ever-consuming thoughts about leaving the abused and hardship life of their father produced exactly the same result instead of gaining something different. All of the daughters began to have children very quickly. In fact, my mother took the rote of becoming pregnant to begin the marriage. As more and more children were born, my grandmother realised that the abuse and hardships that occurred with her and her daughters were headed for her grandchildren. I do not know when and have not been able to decipher the stories to know exactly the time it started, but my grandmother went into military general high gear.

Remember I said she had an armament of things to get your attention. Well, she did. Instead of coming at each of her daughters with that, I told you so, or telling them that they needed to protect the children, when in fact the husbands of the daughters overpowered each of them. She reached into her armament and found that the armament she would use would be kindness and mercy. For this lady who lived all of her life, poor in riches, with multiple hardships and abuse, determined she was going to take charge of her grandchildren by providing to her daughters kindness and to their husbands mercy.

Every one of her grandchildren have looked back at this time in the lives of her and the daughters and saw that while our grandmother might have been financially poor, living with extreme hardships and an abusive husband, she was rich in divine love with a heart as big as God and a spirit that guided her to know the power of intention. My grandmother used the armament of God to protect her grandchildren. She used the acts of kindness and mercy to shelter her grandchildren as much as possible from the hardships and abuse she knew was going on.

She did so in a way that we were able to stay with her for a day at a time, sometimes days on in and sometimes months. In doing so, she nurtured our hearts and minds by teaching us about the goodness of life. Oh and yes, she also taught us about the listening and heeding of her commands with the other armaments in her war chest. Had it not been for her caring about breaking the chain and showing us the light, none of the grandchildren would be who we are. Not to say we are perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but with her intention we were allowed to have a choice.

And it is in that choice that those grandchildren she could influence with the intention she did which allowed us to deal with the situations and move forward with a different perspective on life. This personal reflection about my life identifies that kindness comes from the spirit. It can only come through us when we are living in spirit. To be unkind is to cut off any relationship with the spirit. It is a proven medical fact that the act of kindness itself raises the body’s immune system and increases the serotonin in both the giver of the kindness and the receiver of the kindness in that direct moment kindness is given.

Therefore, to extend, offer and receive kindness, it can only come from the intention of source. For kindness being only available from spirit is only then a condition of the power of source’s intention through us. We stated in the creative section above that all of creation began and continue to be started with a single thought. Now if that thought is not of the spirit then it is an exceptionally low energy thought and our ego takes charge now giving us misperceptions about life. Each one of these low energy thoughts prevents us from attracting into our life experiences our wants and desires.

We become what we think. So to have kindness and mercy we must be thinking high energy thoughts of spirit. When we live a life full of intention we find that we are good to ourselves and good to others. This is not just being polite but good. This happens because God made everything to be good and if we are living in spirit then we can only live by being good. You will find that living a life full of intention we treat ourselves with kindness when we eat, play, exercise, work, love and everything else we do.

We have also come to understand by the law of attraction that what we think about we attract to us. Therefore if we are thinking about kindness and mercy we will also receive them from others. In turn those who give kindness and mercy automatically receive it back so we find ourselves in this massive do loop of giving and receiving of kindness. My grandmother should have been tired and very weary by taking on any level of responsibility for her grandchildren. But what fueled her was the fact that in every act of kindness she gave she received it back more times over and this refueling is what kept her engaged.

It was in her knowing that what you give you shall also receive. It was another one-liner she quoted to us over and over again. I loved my grandmother. Thank you for joining us in this exploration of understanding mercy as a gift of kindness. Until next time remember to keep the faith, stay strong and continue to shine your light in the world. To hear these daily devotions of your daily bread please log on to goddessgovernment.com. Goodbye and may your faith always lead the way. [tr:trw].