Republished with permission from John Pavlovitz
I see you making everything harder than it has to be.
All your striving and searching and pontificating is overcomplicating things and it’s distracting you.
You’re not going to find what you need where you’ve been looking.
You already have it.
There is no magic elixir to ingest, no secret incantation to exhale, no perfectly worded prayer you need to recite, no carefully concealed cipher you have to decode in order to uncover the way to live well to leave a legacy worth surviving you.
You don’t need to wait for a politician to legislate it, a religious leader to carry it down from a cloud-shrouded mountaintop, a shimmering pop star to sing it loudly from a stadium stage, or a grinning self-help guru to deliver it in slick multimedia conference center presentations.
The secret of this far-too brief appearance on the planet isn’t buried in a dusty religious text or a current airport book store bestseller just waiting to be revealed to only those select few anointed pilgrims whose souls are properly receptive.
And you don’t need a church service, election result, protest march, or hashtag campaign to begin the necessary revolution.
The answer is startlingly simple and it’s as close as the heart within your chest.
If you want to know how to be the type of person the world needs right now, just be kind.
That’s it.
Simply step out today into a world populated with grieving, wounded, hopeless human beings and try to leave them less grieving and wounded and hopeless than you found them.
And being kind is more than just doing no harm, it’s working really hard to do some good: move toward people, help them, listen to them, see them, share with them, carry them. It’s the whole point of you being here.
Yes, be kind by opening doors and smiling at strangers and giving up the parking spot and paying for lunch for the guy behind you and being generous with compliments, and all that—but do more than that.
Let people love who they love.
Support them in creating families and building lives and crafting futures together with people who make them feel at home, without feeling the need to impede them or affix your preferences to them or impose your religion upon them. Everyone deserves that kind of happiness so stop trying to prevent them from it. It’s violently unkind.
Allow people to believe in the God they desire—or to believe in no God at all.
Have the humility to admit that as strongly as you feel your convictions, every other human being you meet holds theirs. Trust that people who disagree with you arrived at their conclusions after as much contemplation and diligence as you have—and the truth is you don’t really know any more than they do anyway, so hold that stuff loosely. Respect and even celebration of difference is kindness.
Treat people as if them gaining something does not have to automatically mean you losing something.
Life isn’t a zero-sum game, despite what you’ve been told or been led to believe by your pastors and politicians. There’s actually enough of everything to go around: money, food, healthcare, opportunity, community, so resist hoarding any of these things because you’re only perpetuating other people’s suffering when you do—and you’re being unkind.
It takes so very little just to be kind but it’s costly too, which is why so few people actually care to attempt it.
Kindness might require you to surrender a political position you’re fully entrenched in, to give up a prejudice that you’ve always held tightly to, to admit your own fears and phobias toward people you’ve been conditioned to view as the enemy. You might need to confront your privilege or to reckon with injustice that you’ve benefited from. You may have to hold your tongue or listen more or yield the floor and you might have to give up being right in order to be kind, but it’s the better path.
Be kind to people, because every single person you share this planet with right now is going to die.
In less than 100 years they’ll be gone. They all have a finite amount of time here, and in that fleeting and fragile real estate they are doing the very best they can to hold it all together; to overcome their grief, to find open spaces of breath and moments of unfettered joy; to feel comfortable and accepted in their own skin; to experience times when they feel fully known and genuinely loved.
Help them all.
Help people find peace and belonging and rest—because you’re here and because you easily can.
Try not not be an a**hole and stop avoiding what you already know to be the answer to all that afflicts us:
Just be kind.
John Pavlovitz
John Pavlovitz is a writer, pastor, and activist from Wake Forest, North Carolina. A 25-year veteran in the trenches of local church ministry, John is committed to equality, diversity, and justice—both inside and outside faith communities. When not actively working for a more compassionate planet, John enjoys spending time with his family, exercising, cooking, and having time in nature. He is the author of A Bigger Table, Hope and Other Superpowers, Low, and Stuff That Needs to Be Said.
