Day 18- Hebrews 13:1-2

This week at WorkFest showed me how important it is to treat people with kindness, even if they're doing things that may be getting on my nerves. One of the college students on the purple crew wasn't the most annoying person I had ever met, but there were definitely times when I thought that he was making the same comments too much or beating the dead horse with his jokes. I was able to see the good in him, though, and I got to work with him a lot when it came to putting siding on the house. We even installed a window together, which was kind of difficult because there were a few times when we were afraid it would come crashing down on us.


As the week went on, I felt privileged to have gotten to know him and I ended up liking that quirky side to him. At the reflection time this morning, he was the first person to stand up and talk about his week. He said that he had come into the week thinking that he didn't have any love to give and he didn't think that people in this world could be nice. He also talked about how you don't always know what a person is going through and they may be incredibly unhappy on the inside. He went on to talk about how that had changed this week because of the people that he had met and I started to cry a little because I had gotten to work with him so much. Everyone on our crew had written words of affirmation to each other and the one that he had written to me said, "Thank you for being a friend, for not being scared by my oddness. You helped me to see that people can be nice and I thank you." Jess told me that he had written something along those lines to her, too, so it was great to realize that his life had been impacted in such a positive way by 10 other people.

After the things that he said and wrote, I'm more aware than ever about the importance of treating all people with kindness and respect. There have been too many times in my life that I've met people who were on the odd side and I didn't know what to do, so I would just try to avoid them. This experience showed me that you never know what someone's going through and it's better to take the time to get to know them.

Question: When was a time that you were annoyed by another person and still chose to love them? When was a time that you avoided someone or ignored them because they were doing something you didn't like?