26 Acts...

 
I can't believe that Christmas is already over.  Last night, after putting about 1500 miles on our vehicle, traveling to Bel Air, New Jersey, and Maine, we finally crawled into our own beds.  And I am already missing my family!  From baking traditional Czech cookies and breads with my sister Kristen, to playing Monopoly five billion times with my nephews, to dancing with my nieces to Christmas music, to going to the Lancaster City Market with my entire family, to cramming into "Duck Fat" Restaurant in Portland with my mother-in-law (which is a yuppie restaurant according to her!), to hanging out with my extended family in Jersey for a Czech Christmas Eve bash, to watching the Golden Pig come, to putting up the Nativity with my nieces, to building a Rice Krispy Train with my nephews, to sharing around our table Christmas morning all that we are thankful for...we truly did it all and I am more than blessed.  At the end of this vacation, I realized my love for my family only grows stronger each time I am with them, and I can't wait until we bring home little ones that will be included in all the fun.

At the start of this Christmas Season I had decided that I would not focus on "hoping" or "wishing" or even "praying" for a Christmas miracle in this adoption process.  All I wanted to do was find ways to be grateful for our waiting process, spend time with my family, and bring hope where I could this season.  So, when my sister Heather posted on Facebook that she was interested in doing 26 Acts (a challenge that Ann Curry had posted on Twitter to "do 26 random acts of kindness in memory of the victims of the Newtown, CT shooting"), I jumped at the chance to help.  In fact, our entire family decided we were in.  The weekend leading up to Christmas, our family participated in 26 Acts that ranged from giving bags of hope to salvation army bell ringers, to paying for people's parking in a garage, to buying donuts for elderly men, to visiting people in the hospital, to giving Dunkin and Starbucks cards to police officers, to Christmas caroling as a family, to buying and delivering a loaf of bread to a random table in a restaurant, to paying for someones drive through order, to handing out bags of candy to strangers.  But the highlight for us was going into Macy's, Toy's R Us, and Target to hand out cake pops.

When we started brainstorming ideas of what we could do, we decided it would be cool to go to a few of the stores that were going to be open 24 hours the two nights leading up to Christmas.  So, our family ventured into Macy's first and just started passing out cake pops.  The reaction was awesome!  People were like, "Seriously...this is for us?  Really?  Why are you doing this?  You just brought a tear to my eye and a lump in my throat.  This is the nicest thing anyone has ever done.  I am seriously posting this on my Facebook.  I can't believe this."  All we did was give one little cake pop.

I don't share our random acts of kindness stories to make our family look good or to say we are some kind of "great" family.  I share them, because I learned something that weekend.  It doesn't take much to make a small difference in this world.  We never know people's stories.  Whether it is the elderly man who is barely making it through a city market, a store clerk who is working yet another 12 hour shift, a couple who has locked their keys in their car for the 15th time, or a family who is just in need of some hope, we each have in us the power to choose kindness.

I can't really explain to you how ridiculously addictive Random Acts of Kindness became for our family that weekend.  It will not only go down in the history books as one of the greatest Christmas weekends we have ever had together as a family, but hopefully, it will now be something we carry into our lives every day...practicing kindness every chance we get.  Who knows...choosing kindness might just change the world.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Donut Story

Image
When I was about five years into being a Youth Pastor, I met a group of kids that changed my life.  Many of you reading this, who know me personally, have probably heard me talk about them numerous times.  Nate and I happened to live in the parsonage next door to the church I was serving at at the time, and would routinely come home to a group of boys that I would have described then as "rough around the edges."   They dressed mostly in black, had long hair, and sometimes even had black painted fingernails.  They loved to smoke, and they loved to skateboard.  After a few days of watching them through our window, Nate and I went outside and brought them some sodas.  We introduced ourselves, told them I was the Youth Pastor at the church, and invited them to come to youth group.  While they politely declined our invitation, we continued to invite them over and over again, attempted to skate with them, and fill them with snacks.  Until one day, ...
Read more

A Mother's Heart...

Image
It was the night before we were ready to leave for Ethiopia that it dawned on me. We hadn’t given the necklace to Biruk yet. When we had exchanged necklaces with his birth mom ten years prior at the orphanage, we had no idea when we would give it to him. We just knew that we wanted him to be old enough to appreciate it, as it would be the only thing he would have from her. We had no idea if we would ever see her again.  There have been several moments in our journey where I’ve had to pinch myself, because it has felt like I was dreaming. That night as we put our final things in our suitcases, took a deep breath, and came to the realization that we were not only taking our kids to Ethiopia, but that Biruk would in fact meet his birth mom…well, you had to pinch me, because it felt like I was dreaming. It also felt like the perfect moment to share this gift that we had been holding onto for 10 years. So we pulled out the necklace and gave it to Biruk. While words can be few and...
Read more

Stories Matter

Image
Yesterday, my family and I found ourselves at a local elementary school’s culture club, presenting about our trip to Ethiopia. Even as I write those words, it kind of blows my mind how God has continued to use our story in unexpected places. When the kids were old enough to understand, we began to talk about taking them back to their birth country when they turned 10. We figured at 10, they would be old enough to be pretty good travelers, but still approach the adventure with a childlike wonder. What we didn’t plan on, was that the year Biruk turned 10 would come on the heels of me taking a brand new job, our family moving to a new state, and buying our very first house, in an economy that felt as though it was tanking!  I remember talking to my counselor one day and sharing with him that while we had always promised this trip to our kids, it just didn’t seem to make financial sense. After all, last time I checked, Southwest Airlines does not travel to Africa. He said someth...
Read more