Stop Being Nice

I often joke that Mr. Awesome is nicer than I am. What I really mean is that he is more patient, more compassionate and more accepting than I am. But he's not nice. No joke.

The idea of 'niceness' is one that has pestered me for a long time. It seemed just off of what we should be but I couldn't ever put my finger on exactly why nice was wrong. So I started studying 'nice'. I read a few books on being nice, I studied people who others said were nice. I questioned myself whenever I was being nice. Then I went to my two favourite books; Webster's Dictionary and The Bible.

Here's what Webster's had to say; Nice means agreeable, polite and appropriate. It also means coy and trivial.

Here's what the Bible had to say; "Sorry, we didn't find any results for your search." The word 'nice' doesn't appear in The Bible. At all.

Instead, my Bible search engines kept redirecting me to another word. Kind. There were dozens of Bible verses that spoke of being kind. I looked that word up in Webster's. Here's what it had to say; Kind means having a sympathetic and helpful nature or acting from a thoughtful, gentle or attentive character. It also means loving.

So why wouldn't the Bible have any references to being nice? Nice is nice, isn't it? Not really. Nice is about appearance. Kind is about the heart. Nice is surface. Kind goes deep. Nice can cover your true feelings. Kind changes your perspective.

See the difference?

What if we stopped appearing 'okay' and we really started being okay? What if we stopped behaving right and tuned our hearts into living right, loving right? What if we went deeper than surface Christianese and good citizenship and really became all the good stuff we are capable of becoming?

What if?

What kind of world would we live in then?

I wonder ...

Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another ...
Ephesians 4:32