Kindness, a dead virtue?

I try to read a Proverb a day. The Proverb that corresponds with the numerical day. Since there are 31 days in January, today's reading was Proverbs 31. Verse 26 really stuck out to me today. It says, "She opens her mouth in wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue." Okay, well shut my mouth!! No really, I mean it, half the time, I just need to flat shut my mouth if I cannot manage a kind word! Listening to the people on T.V. in this day and age, reading the secular blogs, and hearing different news outlets, I can say with absolute certainty that I am not the only one who is having a problem with this. People have lost all civility, and kindness has become passe`. After the Arizona shooting people just about tied their arms in a knot pointing fingers of who was to blame for this terrible tragedy. The people on the left blamed the right, and Sarah Palin because she had once used a bulls eye target somewhere. People on the right blamed the people on the left for using heated rhetoric. These "so called" reality shows where just everyday housewives (cough) are turning over tables in restaurants, and cursing each other out. You used to hear the phrase " kill them with kindness", I don't think anyone is killing anyone else with kindness now days. I think we as a society have killed kindness.I believe it is dead or just about dead,if it is alive, it's barely breathing!

There is another passage in Proverbs, chapter 19, verse 22 that says" What is desirable in a man is his kindness..." I would also interchange the word woman here also. God says in His Word that this is something that He desires. We should try to do this if we are to be pleasing to God. Jesus was kind, and if we say we are Christians, we should also be kind like He is. Luke 6: 35 says,..."for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and sinful men."

The Proverbs 31 woman is not only kind, the Bible says she teaches others to be kind. "The teaching of kindness is on her tongue". Mother's are you teaching your children to be kind? Are you correcting them when they are unkind to others? Here's the hard part, are you teaching them to be kind, but they hear you being unkind to their Daddy, or the cashier at the store, or the waitress? Have I gone to meddling? Just some thoughts... this is hard in the world we live in today. But I say, let's revive this old virtue, remember the verse you were taught in Sunday School as a child that says " Be kind to one another, tender- hearted, forgiving each other, just as God in Christ has forgiven you." Ephesians 4: 32. Let's give kindness CPR, and revive it back into our lives. It's important to God!