A recent daily devotion led me to Proverbs 15:23, ‘A person finds joy in giving an apt reply – and how good is a timely word!’ In the NLT version it reads, ‘Say the right thing at the right time’.
I was in London this week taking my 88 year old mum to a musical as a birthday treat. Mum is a Londoner and she hadn’t been to the City, let alone live there, for many years. She is proud of her place of birth and it didn’t disappoint! Looking somewhat lost in the street, someone stopped and helped us find the theatre. On the crowded tube, Mum was given a seat three times and, on the last occasion, the young man who had given up his seat took the time and trouble to wish us a pleasant evening as he left the train. Mum was thrilled with ‘the timely word’.
Whilst from a radically different era and setting, our experience this week reminded me what Victor Frankl, a former concentration camp inmate, wrote: ‘We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances’.
Let’s choose to smile and to give that ‘timely word’, even to strangers, even if we are rebuffed or ignored. I suspect we shall find our attitude and our words accepted many more times than they are ever refused or scorned.
AJ Reid Writes 