“God, how can I keep my kindness?” I prayed nightly through the swish, swish of my rattan swing. “I don’t think people yell at each other in heaven, or in the Garden of Eden,” I would muse.
We lived in hot and humid India, in physical discomfort we hadn’t experienced before. The fuse on my emotional firecracker, usually plenty long and snubbed out before its destination, lay one inch to detonation.
Every evening, I rocked in the rattan swing—a cradle hanging by a chain from the ceiling—to unwind and swish away the stress. Sinking into the rounded seat, the edges wrapped around me, it hid me from the stifling heat, the damp musty air, and the cockroaches scuttling on the floor. Each night, the tiredness of a day filled with an unfamiliar brand of physical labor and constant people fell into that swing.
Tending to the fruits of the Spirit took more patience and intentionality in this place than in my suburban American home. There, kind words came easily with the comfort of full-time electricity, an inside temperature set at exactly an unchanging 78 degrees Fahrenheit, a car I could drive at any time of day or night, and grocery stores minutes away.
When we first arrived in India, we all felt hungry from eating unfamiliar foods. Deprivation of luxuries such as packaged cereal, deli lunchmeat, tortilla chips, and spaghetti sauce in a jar made us feel cheated. We were tired—sleeping on thin floor mattresses, all six of us in the one room that had a semi-functional air conditioner, left us robbed of sleep. And the heat, with inside temperatures of 90 degrees and 90 percent humidity, pressed in on our family like a pressure cooker.
Everyone lived with the pressurized steam constant and whistling, stifled under a thin layer of humanness, ready to blow at any moment. We were operating on the bottom rung of Maslow’s hierarchy—a psychological pyramid with a climb from survival to self-awareness. And when you live on the bottom rung, desperate for physical comfort and physical survival, the ability to use nice words disappears. There at the bottom, the margin to be kind disappears.
One day, my husband and I sat all four children down around the table and said, “We acknowledge our weakness. Only a paper-thin cushion separates the way we feel from acting on the way we feel. So, today, our goal is kindness. That’s it. We’ll speak in kindness to each other. We’ll act in kind ways to each other. That’s the goal for today.”
We decided to use this season of discomfort to practice perseverance and to curb our selfishness, to sharpen our ability to suffer in silence, to learn to cool the fires of anger that easily erupted in some of us—so that peace could enter our home once again.
We imagined how our ugly words and the spewing of our discomfort turned to black oil all over the other person. We pictured ourselves donning ethereal gowns called kindness, and we relished their imaginary cooling effects. To be kind meant keeping that sticky awfulness to ourselves, exchanging it for cooling robes of grace.
And over time, I found myself able to endure more heat and more stickiness. I kept silent more often and could dismiss the gnawing wish for an ice-cold Diet Pepsi. I could slick back my sweat-soaked hair into a ponytail and sigh, “Tonight, tonight, I will soon be swinging in my chair. Soon, tonight in my hanging chair, everything will be alright.”
After winning a few of the day’s battles to persevere in kindness, India would blow its breeze of peace that comes evening time. And I would swish, swish into a quiet rest and hear the sounds of the city: a barking dog, the neighbor pat-patting chapattis on a flat stone, crickets chirping, even the added swishes of a hundred bats stirring from their upside-down slumber on the banana trees next to our veranda.
Clothed in kindness, little by little, we could stop yelling on earth, as it is in heaven!
Original article: FrontiersUSA.org/blog/article/theres-no-yelling-in-heaven
