By April Terry (personal blog http://faithwarming.blogspot.com)

CBS’ “Sunday Morning” brought it again with a segment on a postal worker whose complimentary nature makes it worth the long lines.  You can watch that segment here .  In the segment, a postal worker named Mike makes a difference at the post office located on the campus of Penn State in Pennsylvania by finding something nice to say about everyone in line—every day.  For that reason, he has people coming to his line to buy stamps even though they don’t need them and his lines are long, though it’s unlikely that they are miserably long because everyone enjoys waiting for their turn to be treated special.

It’s really nothing special and when asked how he does it day in and day out, Mike struggles for an answer.  “I’m just being myself,” he says humbly.  It may be true that Postman Mike is just a naturally kind person, but it’s also true that we could all learn something about the impact of a gentle and kind spirit from someone who is habitually kind.  We might find that it feels good to be kind.

I’m how to buy viagra online without prescription sure we’ve all met that person who always dwells on the negative.  I actually used to be that person.  As a young woman, I was desperately and hopelessly hooked into a negative viewpoint that clouded the good in my life.  Instead of seeing the good things that happened, I focused on the things that went wrong.  When I saw someone beautiful, I assumed they must be stuck up.  It was a form of insecurity that had become a really bad habit.

It was kindness from others that started the healing in me.  I remember one day in particular when someone came and invited me to play tennis with a group of people.  I remember thinking, “Why would she want to have anything to do with me?”  The reason that I wondered that was because by the rules that I had always understood, I was inferior to this person.  This person was essentially inviting me to philosophically jump the queue.

I know now that the queue was my own invention, and not only was I restricting myself to a caste system of sorts, but I was holding others to it as well.  That’s how it often works.  So, when we live beyond the rules and regulations of castes and clicks, we find out that from God’s vantage point there are no clicks or castes.

Galatians 3:25-28 reads,

“But after that faith is come, we are no longer under a schoolmaster.  For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Postman Mike must have learned that bringing joy to others brings joy to life, and his story proves that people will go to extraordinary lengths to be near someone whose joy is shared.  As believers in the promise of Christ’s redemption, our joy should be outward and obvious.  It should be overflowing and flooding the world until it is obvious that being loved by God brings joy in a new way of living and loving.  That has to be the difference that we bring to world.