Kindness

Penny Brown and Kevin Stephan both owe their lives to the other. Kevin was an 11-year-old batboy in July of 1999 when a player accidentally dealt him a severe blow to the chest with a bat while warming up. Kevin passed out, and his heart stopped beating.

Penny (a nurse) was at the game to watch her son play when she saw this transpire. She rushed down to Kevin and performed CPR which brought him back. Kevin’s mother said he was very fortunate because Penny was scheduled to work that day and had been given the day off at the last minute.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, was ten years old when he saw a commercial stating that every puff a smoker took on a cigarette shortened his or her life by two minutes. He was quite a math whiz, so he began adding up how many minutes a long-time smoker like his grandmother had lost to cigarettes. To his surprise, Jeff’s grandmother began to cry when he announced that she had lost sixteen years of her life to smoking. His grandfather took him aside for a talking to. To Jeff’s surprise, his grandfather was not angry, nor did he attempt to punish him.

Sixty-eight-year-old Elsie Holdren lost her position as a security guard in August 2010 because she was too courteous. Her superiors wrote, “Due to your caring and giving nature, you are compromising your position as a security officer. Being caring and giving is not a job requirement, nor is it what you are paid to do.” Elsie was transferred to a new position in nearby Melbourne. Most people would not be fired because they are too nice, but because they are not nice enough.

Source: Unknown

There is a story told about the surrender of the Confederacy at Appomattox Courthouse as the Civil War concluded. General Grant was an unusual man. Knowing the war was over and the victory was his, he showed great, and unusual, kindness and respect toward the chief general of the Confederates. He allowed General Robert E. Lee to ride freely in and out of the area. He also allowed the Confederate men to keep their possessions and horses. Grant gave them food because they were hungry and let them all go home undisturbed.

One day a teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name.

Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down. It took the remainder of the class period to finish their assignment, and as the students left the room, each one handed in the papers.

That Saturday, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and listed what everyone else had said about that individual.