Simply Kind Tuesdays ~ Week 21

Claudia the hostess of Simply Kind Tuesdays speaks about Silence this week.

I did lots of reading for this post this morning (now yesterday). I wonder if I can remember all my points. I got to the end of this sermon I think and was having a hard time. I had been looking up Ephesians 4:31-32.

"Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice: 4:32And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you." KJV

Here are some points in the sermon:

"Remove...

Bitterness - smoldering resentment. Clamour - outward acts of violence. Anger - a deep subtle feeling of sin. Evil speaking - slander, criticism, gossip. Malice - hatred on the inside. Wrath - a wild explosion of rage. And, according to Paul, we must remove "all" of this stuff.

Replace it with...

Tenderheartedness - the opposite of being hard-hearted, calloused, unfeeling, refusing to understand another person's feelings or circumstances. If you will remove all bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, evil speaking and malice and will replace what you have removed with tenderheartedness you will have created an environment in which you can keep God's command to be kind one to another."

I had my husband talking about it to me to make sure I hadn't done anything wrong. I was talking about an incident that happened yesterday (now the day before), that I thought happens a lot around here around town. His explanation of malice was clear. When I read these types of words they have not a very clear meaning to me. How about you? In the meantime this is some of my thinking about myself.

"The Memory That We Were Kind ~ Mark Rickerby

Does anyone know where the little boy went?
The little boy who used to be me?
He’s still alive somewhere inside this shell
Though the shell is all you can see.

Can you still see him reaching out for love
From behind these time-worn eyes?
The child with a heart as bright as the stars
Hiding beneath this thin disguise?

What a cruel trickster Father Time can be
Changing our costumes as we age.
From infant to child, and from young to old,
A new character with every stage.

We might as well be four different people.
The adult barely resembles the child.
The external transformation is so complete,
Young and old are rarely reconciled.

But there are some whose eyes still twinkle,
For whom the child within never dies.
The outside world can see only the surface
But they know how the surface lies.

What can we learn from all this changing?
From the fact that nothing is real?
How can we judge by a deceptive façade
That hides the way we truly feel?

The only path to true knowledge, it seems,
Is to think of everyone that we see
As the child they were, who they are today,
And the old person they soon will be... "

The people who were in this incident were advised to forgive each other. Also that people who are married liked each other and still do just can't live with each other. Well, that is perhaps going a little too far.

This brings me to the point about myself, advice given and forgiving people all over the place, and criticising. My husband said I wasn't criticising, just learning what has gone on and understanding.

The scripture then came up in the book I have been reading by Catherine Palmer called Wild Heather.

So basically my husband didn't think too much of the sermon. I didn't think too much of the advice given to the people in the incident. The line in the poem is confusing "Can you still see him reaching out for love..." not sure how that fitted in.