The Daily Pearl
On Kindness
A pearl kept from the brand’s mornings: a verse to hold, a prayer to say and a word to carry.
“She openeth her mouth with wisdom; and in her tongue is the law of kindness.”
Proverbs 31 : 26
A Prayer for This Morning
Father, set a watch over my tongue and a law of kindness upon it. Where I could be clever at someone's expense, make me gentle instead. Let the words I leave behind today be ones I would be glad to meet again.
Affirmation
I will spend my words the way I would spend treasure: deliberately, and to someone's good.
The Reflection
Of all the tributes paid to the woman of Proverbs 31, this one is the strangest and the loveliest: in her tongue is the law of kindness. Not the impulse of kindness, or the mood of it, but the law: something legislated, settled in advance, no longer up for daily vote.
That is the difference between being nice and being kind. Niceness responds to weather; it is warm when treated warmly. Kindness has constitutional standing. It has decided, before the provocation arrives, how it will speak, and so it is free from the exhausting arithmetic of who deserves what.
Kindnesses string like pearls: one by one, each small, the strand eventually unmistakable. No one remembers a single knot on the thread. Everyone remembers the woman whose words, over years, were consistently safe to be near.
In Her Company
St Elizabeth of Hungary
A queen who carried bread to the poor with her own hands, proving that no station is too high for kindness and no act of it too small.
Elizabeth of Hungary (1207 to 1231) was a princess married at fourteen and widowed at twenty. She gave her dowry to build a hospital at Marburg and served the sick there with her own hands. She died at twenty-four and was canonised within four years, so widely was her charity known.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
The Wardrobe