Tuesday, June 4, 2013

Kindness, Week Twenty Two

Here are this week's acts of kindness!

May 28- Reminded someone that I was thinking of them. I have a few friends who are going through some very difficult times right now. I try to be encouraging and remind them that God can work things out in ways we can't imagine. On this day I sent a card to one of these friends, and I hope it brightened her day.

May 29- Organized a surprise. Well, really this one was a joint effort. My friend Betty was in the hospital recently, and I wanted to send her something as a get well gift. But flowers are expensive- even with my $20 coupon code. So I told my mom I had an idea to send her flowers and see if anyone at Bible study wanted to contribute. But then we remembered that flowers might aggravate Betty's breathing problems, and all the low-pollen flower arrangements were boring. The website I have a coupon for also had some stuffed animals, and I said  we could send one of those. My mom said "do they have elephants?" Because that's Betty's favorite animal. No elephants there, but Build A Bear has elephants! So we sent Betty an elephant with a get well message- and he was dressed in scrubs! She really liked him. : )

May 30- Told someone I'm proud of them. Our boy Said in Tanzania sent a letter recently saying that he passed his exams and would be moving forward in school. Said has struggled with school for as long as we've been writing to him, so I was very excited to read this news! On this day, I called Compassion and said that I would like to send a small financial gift to Said, and bragged on him a bit to the lady that answered the phone. I hope Said is able to get something he needs or something really fun with the gift!

May 31- Donated a Bible. On this day, my mom and I went up to Lifeway, where she works. At Lifeway, they are always collecting donations for something- usually Bibles, but sometimes plush animals at Christmas or whatever. Right now our Lifeway is asking each customer if they would like to purchase one of the Bibles they have on sale for $5 and donate it to a ministry that works with homeless people in our city. They are really nice Bibles available in lots of different translations (you can also buy some for yourself to keep on hand!) So I donated a Bible. Easy peasy. I know that a lot of people don't like being asked to purchase extra stuff when they are checking out at a store, but in cases like these, the employees usually have a goal they have to meet for the month for selling these extra items. If you are donating an item like these Bibles (or other stores that offer "add-ons" for charity), you are really helping two people- the people who will receive the gift, and the employee you bought it from.

June 1- Bought groceries with a purpose. I had to stop by the store before work on this day, and I picked out a few items from Con Agra. I don't know much about the company, but one cool thing they do is provide you with a code with each purchase. You can then enter the code on this special website, and they will donate food to end child hunger. I really like programs like this, and am more likely to buy from companies that give me a chance to help others!

June 2- Threw in a gift card. This one was sneaky, and I liked it. We went out to dinner with my in-laws for my brother-in-law's birthday on this day. There are a lot of us. My husband is one of four children, then there's me, and Brandon's parents. Seven people going out to eat can get expensive. The restaurant that my brother in law picked happened to be one that I had a gift card for- I got it for my birthday last month. When we were seated, I told my mother-in-law to please use "whatever was left" on the gift card, implying that it was just a few bucks. But really it was a whole, in-tact gift card. I know it didn't make much of a dent (Red Lobster is expensive, y'all. Sheesh. And I think everything went up by $5 since the last time we were there) but they have treated us to dinner so many times, it was nice to help out with the bill. : )

June 3- Took my time helping someone. Last night at work, we had a young woman come in toward the end of the evening. She started asking my coworker some questions about the movies we had available, and I caught on pretty quickly that she had some developmental delays. My coworker had something she had to do, so I offered to step in and help. Help, in this case, involved spending almost half an hour going through every DVD on our shelves multiple times. ("Do you have any vampire movies? Scary movies? Bloody movies? Love stories? What's this one? That one's in Chinese. What about murder movies?") It was an interesting experience, for sure, but I was patient and picked out a few movies for her (and I tried to steer her toward non-bloody suspenseful thrillers, too.) That also gave my coworkers a chance to take care of what they needed to do at the end of the day.




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