NOT ENOUGH TO BE NICE
It’s not enough to be just “nice” I am not cut out for working in retail, I just don’t have the patience with customers that you need. My daughter, Catherine, on the
other hand, does. She always displays the kind of ‘being nice’ that you can only show if you’ve earned a PHD in ‘Advanced Niceness’ from St Francis of Assisi College Oxford…. with honours!
For example, one day, as she was working in a health food store in Chelmsford at the time, a posh customer showed her a phone pic of a completely empty bottle of a particular brand of apple cider vinegar that a friend had just sent her, so that she could make sure she bought the “right kind”.
“Ah we stock that”, my daughter said, and went to fetch a bottle with the pale amber contents showing within. “No sorry, that’s obviously the wrong kind”, the lady said. “Look”, she said, “...the kind I want is transparent!”. Catherine thought it was a joke for a second…it wasn’t a joke (this was the south of the country; they don’t do northern ironic humour of course).
There then followed a bizarre dialogue with the woman, where Catherine kept telling her that the friend had just sent her a pic of an empty bottle of the same product, whilst the lady, getting brusquer by the minute, kept insisting she just wanted “the transparent kind, not the pale amber kind”. In the end she said she would come back another day when another assistant was in and stomped out clutching the mobile with the empty cider vinegar bottle pic still displayed!
It is often said, “It costs nothing to be nice”, if you work in retail, like Catherine, you may beg to differ.
Most displays of being ‘nice’ generally involve being smiley, remaining calm, soft voiced and amenable when you’re with someone, usually for a relatively short time. Christians sometimes have a reputation for “being nice”, in some cases to the point of being nauseating. God calls us to be more than that just ‘nice’ though, doesn’t he?
In the Bible, in the letter from James chapter two it says,
“What good is it if someone claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such a faith save him? Suppose a brother or sister is without clothes or daily food? If one of you says to him, "Go, I wish you well; keep warm and well fed,” but does nothing about his physical needs what good is it? In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action is dead.
To be “nice” tends to be short term and largely leaves us uninvolved with people and their problems. To love, as God calls us to love, is instead to be proactive and actively doing, not just ‘saying’ we’ll do. I love seeing our church family displaying genuine acts of kindness, week by week, to those who attend; those who visit us occasionally, and to those currently in the wider community who desperately need help at this difficult time.
Kindness is “niceness” with its boots on and ready for action! Kindness, is in turn, the bridge that the love of God can walk over to touch people at the point of their need. Love always gets through if we persist long enough with God’s enabling.
by Fred Wright 15th March 2023
