The Way It Is

Random Acts of Kindness

I'm sure we've all heard of the phrase "random act of kindness". I'm sure we've all participated in random acts of kindness. There are countless things we do every day on a whim that reflect the good nature of people. Whether it's holding the door for someone, smiling at a little child, allowing someone to move lanes in front of you - there are many opportunities for these kinds of acts, and I encourage them.

Recently I've been in a spiritual slump. I haven't felt good about my relationship with God, and most of it has been due to the fact that my prayers have barely been reaching the ceiling. This is because I haven't really had anything specific to pray for. Has that ever happened to any of you? When I don't have specific things to pray for, I can't as easily see God's hand in my life, so I decided to change my prayers.  I decided to wake every day and ask God to lead me to someone who needed my help. I no longer wanted to serve him and his children randomly, I wanted him to lead me to the people who were asking for his help. What a week it has been!



Let me just say that God is very interested in the lives of all of his children and he wants to bless everyone. However, he needs our help. He needs people who want to be instruments in his hands. He needs people who say to him, "I want you to use me today to bless the world".

I wrote this brief poem that expressed how I was feeling this past week.

I don't want to bless a stranger
I don't want to give alone
I want to give to someone
That God needs me to know

I don't want a random chancing
Not just any passerby
I want to find the seeker
To answer his suffering cry

I bow my head and bend my knee
Each morning when I wake
God lead me to the one in need
Care for this soul I'll take

I want to be thy servant
Not wandering by chance
I want to share thy love today
I want to be thy hands

Thanks to all of you who have a desire to care for others and ease the burdens of those around you. Check out this amazing video. I hope my children grow up with a desire to be like this young woman.

Labels: God, helping, kindness, prayer, service

posted by Ben Arkell @ 10:42 AM 3 Comments

A Small Serving

It continues to amaze me how the small acts we do tend to have a much larger impact than we expect. We often think that in order to make a large impact on the world, we must do some great thing. Here's the thing. God is in the small details of our lives. He's there every minute, every hour. His Spirit prompts us to do small acts of service probably all day long. How often do we follow through? A friend of mine has mentioned to me countless times of impressions he/she has received and didn't follow through because it was such a small thing. I'm impressed that this person receives those impressions, because I have a hard time hearing them. The key is the follow through.

I heard it said of Thomas S. Monson that what differentiates him from the average person is that he acts on the things we think about doing. This reminds me of visits we made to a very old, kind man, who would always offer my children ice cream. He would always have such a hard time digging the ice cream out because he had no ice cream scoop - he had a small spoon that would bend under the pressure of excavating the ice cream and loading it onto the cones. I thought to myself, "I'm going to buy this man the best ice cream scoop I can find". Amazingly, instead of just thinking about it for months, I did it. I bought the ice cream scoop. Actually, it was one of these bad boys below. It was an ice cream spade. The next time we visited we gave him the spade and he was thankful and commented on how much he liked it. It was so much easier to scoop the ice cream out.



The thing that was so touching was this: every single time we went to visit this man after that, and I mean EVERY SINGLE TIME for at least a year, he mentioned that we gave him that ice cream scoop and he loved it. You and I might think, it's a silly ice cream spade that cost eight dollars. For this man however it represented something so much more. It meant that someone was thinking of him. It meant that people were concerned for him. It meant that he was not completely alone.

So the next time you have a thought that you should buy something at the store for someone, or ask to watch their kids, or mow someone's lawn, or EVEN to buy someone an ice cream spade, don't delay. The ice cream is melting!

Labels: caring, helping, service, sharing, small things

posted by Ben Arkell @ 9:54 PM 4 Comments