Act Compassionately

Love is in the feet!  That's a popular Nigerian expressions.  Nigeria is in West Africa where my family lived in a little village a couple of hundred miles south of the Sahara Desert. The rainy season was brief there, only two or three months long.  So the sight of dusty, often shoeless feet, was pretty common in a culture where walking is the primary mode of transportation.  Even in the sandy soil of sub-saharan Africa, broad, dusty, shoeless, calloused feet can be beautiful when they are moved by compassion, kindness and love.

In his book, Conspiracy of Kindness, Steve Sjogren tells the story of how his church conspired to get off of their pews and hit the streets with love in their feet.  After reading Steve's book, I persuaded folks in my church to do the same.  It was a blast!

Our first act of kindness involved taking loaves of homemade bread to homes in a needy part of town.  While heading down one street I passed a house where the front door was wide open and a dog inside started to bark and run toward me.  "Hey," I shouted, "close your door, before your dog runs away." (I wasn't worried about the dog)  The tiny voice of a little girl replied, "We don't have a door." I was startled to find someone living in my town, within blocks of my house, who didn't have a front door.

When our group came together again after passing out the loaves of bread, others shared similar stories of needs within the community.  Why hadn't we seen these needs before?  Because our feet hadn't taken us that way before. Every Sunday, kind hearted church goers drive past needy neighbors without noticing their needs.  We need to slow down, look around, and let the love in our hearts flow into our feet.

The next week we returned to the community where we had passed out loaves of bread, but we didn't return with more bread.  We came to put a new door on the little girl's house, and pour a new cement slab for an elderly man whose front stoop needed to be replaced and to built a handicap ramp for a single mom with a disabled child. With love in our hearts and in our feet, we felt like dancing!