Random Acts of Kindness

A good friend brought up a challenge to me today in which she was planning to participate.  It's a Random Acts of Kindness challenge.  30 days and at least one Random Act of Kindness per day.  The kids and I have emphatically decided to join in with her.  In these days of hurried schedules, tight budgets, Christian-in-name-only attitudes, where we spend more of our day buried in Facebook and on our smartphones than we do actually talking to our kids, it obvious to me that we NEED more kindness.  We need to spend more time engaged with those people around us.  I think love is perhaps the only good thing you can't get too much of. 

I'm like many other people out there.  I find that I'm frequently so busy in my day-to-day that I don't spend any time at all actually considering ways in which I could be kind to someone else.  I intend for this challenge to teach me as much as it teaches my kids.  The challenge guidelines are as follows:

1. Decide to accept the challenge and work with your friends, family or solo to accomplish  at least 30 random acts of kindness in 30 days.

2.  Find a way to track and record your acts of kindness.  It could be a chart, x's on a calendar, tally marks in a notebook, whatever works for you.  Personally we are using a big chart, lest we forget, and each person is assigned a different color to use to fill in the blocks above their name. 

3. The "size" of the act doesn't matter.  It just needs to be a deliberate and random act of kindness.  It could be something small like leaving a quarter by the candy machines at the grocery store so a kid can get a free treat or something big like running a marathon to fight cancer.   For example, the first thing I counted for today was merely helping an elderly woman who had dropped her keys in the parking lot at the dentist's office.

4. At the end of your 30 days find a simple way to celebrate.  We intend to have a pizza and movie night. 

That's it.  Pretty simple.  It should be a good learning experience for everyone involved and hopefully it will make us more aware so we carry it on past the 30 day challenge.