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Totally Addicted to Nice
by Cate Russell-Cole When I was in Primary School, one of our teachers told me that when you write, don't use the words 'nice' or 'good,' because they are overused. Last year, a work colleague accused me of being 'too nice,' and if you believe the titles in the business section of the bookstores, "Nice Girls Don't Get The Corner Office" either. I have a big problem with nice being totally out of fashion. You see, nice dovetails, dare I say it, 'very nicely...' with the fruit of the Spirit. Nice encompasses love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness and self control. I know I have a problem with not standing up for myself enough. I am a non confrontationist! So for awhile, I tried being less nice, too see if too nice really was a problem. I got noticeably grumpy with complete strangers when they were rude. I thought about 'me' more. I hated it. I hated the negativity it bought into my life. It was also as if the enemy was deliberately bringing nasty people into my path, so I could practice my 'non-nice' ways and go further to the dark side. Thing is, the dark side held no reward for me. Unlike Darth Vader, going to the dark side struck such a bung note in me, I realised I prefer to generate peace, ignore the occasional offence and encourage people. I don't care about getting the corner office! I am not after power. I am more concerned with not letting go of the small tracings of the fruit of the Spirit that the Lord has been striving to build into me all these years. So I am going to stay nice. Even better, I have started a 'nice offensive.' I am trying to actively bless those who have wronged me. I am going to try hard to spread positives: not complaints, strife, moaning, accusing, being unforgiving or vengeful. Achieving that is going to be hard work in some circumstances, but starting down the light path has given me my peace back. So join with me and in addition to spreading the odd random act of kindness, spread a whole heap of not so random acts of niceness. We can make the world a much nicer place! This article by Cate Russell-Cole is under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) Written in Australian English. Article Source: http://www.faithwriters.com |