Kindness, No Matter What

by Alexis 

Today, God has been speaking to me about being nice to people no matter what.

You know that person who you don’t like because they’re always acting immature, or that girl you aren’t friends with just because she makes fun of you or your friends? Well, there is always going to be somebody like that. But that doesn’t mean you have the right to hate them. You never know what they could be going through in their lives, and hating them could make it worse. It certainly doesn’t help the way kindness and love can.

The first thing this morning, I woke up after a bad dream. In it, my four year old brother, Nick,  and my dad were in a different room than I was. The room that I was in was dark. My dad came in, reached out to grab my hand and my sister’s hand, and he told us all, “Nick is having a heart attack.” It didn’t occur to me until after I woke up that nobody was actually freaking out. My dad was doing nothing but standing there.

Later in the dream, it somehow turned into “Nick has a tumor.” He was lying in a bed that we rolled around. He was dying of cancer. We brought him around to do a bunch of stuff before he died. He was acting like my one year old brother, Zack, and saying “bad guy” over and over the same way Zack does (I have no idea why). I forget what happened in the rest of the dream, and before I knew it, I was awake. One of the first things I heard from my mom was that Nick had an appointment at the doctor’s office for a cough that my mom and sister had already had. We knew he needed medicine. After hearing about this appointment, I thought, “Well, at least he isn’t dead.”

Then, I babysat almost all day, and when I got home, I got on the computer. I went on an awesome Facebook page, Christian memes. They always post about new videos from one of my favorite YouTube channels, BlimeyCow. A new one had come out today, so I watched it. It’s called “Seven Things Everybody Needs to Be Told”. The main idea is that you should be nice to people – and maybe tell them one of the seven things (i.e. I love you) -- no matter how they act, because their behavior could be a product of bad experiences at home or with friends. You don’t know what somebody is going through. So, you should always remember to treat everybody with kindness, not hatefulness.

A short time later, I was scrolling through my newsfeed when I found a funny picture of the SkitGuys. They had put their faces on Monster’s Inc’s Mike Wizowski and Sulley’s bodies. That reminded me that I hadn’t watched a SkitGuys video in a pretty long time, so I got on YouTube and looked them up. I figured that, in all that time that I hadn’t watched their videos, they had to have a new one up. Sure enough, I found a title that I didn’t recognize, and watched “Skit Guys - Little Billy: My God is So Big”. It’s about a little boy, Billy, at Sunday School whose teacher, Miss Linda, had been absent for a while. There had been many substitutes before, and the new one was the teacher’s husband. Billy was being his typical self, and tried to reject the new substitute. When the sub tried to sing My God Is So Big, Billy complained that that was “Miss Linda’s song” and that the new teacher couldn’t sing it. He tried to sing Jesus Loves Me instead. The two characters go through a funny skit about Billy and the new teacher.

Towards the end, Billy finally ends up asking, “Why do we have to sing Miss Linda’s song?” And at this, the sub got quiet. “Because my wife has cancer,” he started to say. With a tear in his eye, he explains to Billy, “My wife is very sick. She asked me if I could come today, and I just thought we could sing her favorite song…” As the teacher goes on about Miss Linda, Billy starts to feel bad. Once the sub fell quiet, Billy started to sing, “My God Is So Big.” And that was the end of the video.

After I watched this funny and beautiful video, I realized the main idea of today: that you don’t know what people might be going through, so you should be nice to them. I put everything together in my mind: in the dream, I experienced what it might feel like to have one of my little brothers die. Many people go through this in real life, and others go through other problems, such as abuse. It could greatly affect them, causing them to act up, bully others, or get stuck in bad moods all the time. The BlimeyCow video demonstrated what might happen if people like this were encouraged more, and ignored less. Lastly, the SkitGuys video was related to this. The substitute and Billy didn’t get along, partly because of Billy’s stubbornness, but also greatly because of what the teacher was going through.

My point is, be nice. That bully at school? Show kindness to him or her. That kid who is always in a bad mood, and who just “doesn’t want to talk about it?” Don’t push it, but make sure they understand that you’re there to listen if they need you. Sure, sometimes you can’t do much. But even those small things can make a huge difference. So, let somebody know that they have a friend. And I don’t mean you. You should be a friend to them, of course, but be sure to remind them that Jesus is their everlasting friend.