This is my speech to the 2021 graduating class of Leadership Medina County. Given at the Blair Conference Center on May 5, 2021. Special thanks to Colleen Rice, executive director of Leadership Medina County for the invitation and opportunity to speak. And to the kind listeners of the graduating class, go forth and lead! 

Good evening, I’m the Rev. Luke Lindon, and I’m the senior pastor at Medina United Church of Christ, Congregational. We are the church on the square that’s been welcoming, loving, and serving for 202 years. It is an honor to speak to you tonight, and I thank you for inviting me.

I understand that you’ve been engaging not only in good leadership practices, but in random acts of kindness throughout your program. I cannot stress enough the impact of random acts of kindness.

I had a rough day last month. Someone had lost their mind in the pandemic, and it was coming out sideways directed at me. I was obsessing over it. I was wondering what other job I could do that doesn’t involve people. I can throw some really awesome pity parties, consider booking me for your next one.

I was feeling down, and I came home and there in the mail was a thank you card. A hand written note thanking me for all the work I had done over the pandemic, and what I’m still doing. There was a gift card in there, the icing on the cake. That simple, random act of kindness lifted my spirits. It charged me up. I was ready to bend the world toward blessing.

We live in a time of great mistrust. The feeling that we are one as a nation is rapidly disappearing, and that carries over into people’s private lives. There’s a pervasive sense of everyone for themselves. We are becoming more isolated. This is covered by Robert Putnam in his seminal book Bowling Alone, which I recommend to you.

A way to reverse this? Random acts of kindness. Paying for someone’s coffee is a small thing, but its impact reminds that person that there is kindness in the world. That we are connected to one another.

Around the holidays, a phenomenon of random acts of kindness broke out at Cool Beans on the Medina square. I wonder if y’all didn’t have something to do with it. People paid for one another’s drinks so much that the staff had to put up a wall of post-it notes denoting prepaid drinks. If you were in need, you could take down one of the notes, hand it to the cashier, and receive a free drink.  I counted 20 when I went in there in mid-January. It was overwhelming. It gave me a sense of hope.

A reminder that through all the talking heads. All the heated arguments. All the static on the socials… A cup of coffee or tea or a cookie at our local coffee shop reminded me that there are good people in the world.

In my line of work, I’ll give a sermon and then stand in a receiving line as people leave worship. It’s a weird tradition, but it’s what we do. I find that if 99 people say they loved the sermon and one person says they didn’t like it, or didn’t like a certain turn of phrase… will I focus on the 99 or will I obsess over the one person? You guessed it, I will obsess over the 1. Maybe it’s just me…. Or maybe it is human nature. We focus on the bad. The one thing. Yet a random act of kindness can lift our eyes, change our focus, help us realize that there is more good in the world. That someone, somewhere is looking out for us.

As others already are. There are folks whose sole job is to look out for others. Do we have any medical professionals. First responders. Social workers. Therapists. Engineers. Clergy. Folks in nonprofits. Heck, folks in retail. In almost every job I can think of, the core mission of the job is to help our fellow human. We might be helping them buy a product, but it’s still helping and we believe the product will some how better their life.

If done right… with the right spirit and attitude… this could be the healing of our nation, at least an important part of the equation.

You have done random acts of kindness throughout your program. This is extremely important. In whatever way you did them, you impacted someone’s life for the positive.

One pastor I know did that. He was sent to Dolores Mission, right in the middle of LA, in the mid-80s. This was the gang capital of the US at the time.

He started with random acts of kindness. Praying for this gang member here. Doing another rival’s funeral there. That was part of the job, but what wasn’t part of the job was to help find jobs for those coming out of prison. He started with random acts of kindness… but he didn’t end there. He went to the next level. He started doing Strategic Acts of kindness.

This is the story of Father Greg Boyle, who started Homeboy Industries in LA. Their motto is: nothing stops a bullet like a job. Over the decades, Father G has started a print shop, lawn service, café and bakery. Father G says on the first day on the job… a former gang member will make a big deal and refuse to work with a former rival. No exceptions.

Yet within a month of working together, those two will laugh and become great friends. No exceptions.

Father G says there is one reason any young person joins a gang, and that is a “lethal absence of hope.” He writes this in his book Tattoos on the Heart: “No kid is seeking anything when he joins a gang, he’s always fleeing something. There are no exceptions.”

What ultimately heals us is connection and kinship. Mother Teresa diagnosed us correctly when she said, “We have forgotten that we belong to one another.”

Whatever label you came in with… when you did your random act of kindness it came with no strings attached. It had no concern for labels. It reminded someone somewhere that they are connected. Reminded them of their kinship with the world. Someone somewhere was looking out for them.

Whatever you do. Wherever you go from tonight… Keep doing random acts of kindness. You just might stumble onto a purpose. Or a deep inner call. A thought might occur to you, something simple like “maybe there should be fewer gang shootings in my neighborhood” like Father G thought. Then you start to get strategic around it.

If you plan on being a manager or a CEO or some sort of business leader or you already are THE BOSS… then maybe the strategic act of kindness would be transforming your work culture into one that nurtures leaders.

I talked to a friend who worked in finance all his life in preparation for this day. I asked about his approach to leadership. He said, “I view myself more like a person with plants in window-boxes. My goal is to understand the plants, help them grow and see what they become. From the very start, I recognized that they would not stay in the window box. At least not most of them. My job was to help them grow into the best possible version of themselves. If you have a staff of 20 people; and all of them are growing, you will lose many to other firms. But you will keep many, too. We are tempted to think that the objective work is the goal and the people are the means. It’s the opposite. People are the goal. But we know that deep down underneath this, it’s all about these humans.”

This approach my friend took was not random, it was strategic. He saw what worked and what didn’t. He wanted to build an optimized work force, and after trying various things, he found the plant-metaphor approach worked best. He was strategic.

That means we have to change our thinking. We’re in an increasingly isolated culture. People can wake up, jump in their car, drive to work, and come home, all without interacting with their neighbors. This is by design. The first social media tools are our neighborhood designs. Older designs have sidewalks and front porches. The newer developments may not have sidewalks, and the back patio is where all the action happens.[1]

Not only are we in an isolated culture… by design… we’re also in a punitive culture. We reward you if you have you stuff together, and we punish you if you’re not. That is by design, but it’s not really how humans work. We cannot flourish in that system even though it’s how our justice system, educational system, and many corporate systems are set up. Child Psychologist Dr Jody Carrington states that “you cannot punish someone into kindness. You cannot take away enough stuff to make people be kind.”

The ability to be kind is a learned behavior. We know this to be true.

There is a preschool attached to my church. Hobby Horse Preschool teaches kindness. All day long, I hear, “oh honey, we use our inside voice.”

“We don’t hit our friends. I know, I know. We share our toys.”

This nurturing approach teaches little humans how to regulate their emotions. We don’t know how to do this on our own. Infants only know how to cry and scream when something is wrong. It takes a big person to come along and comfort and figure out the problem and help fix it. It’s not random. It’s strategic. If someone were to hand you a crying baby, you’d automatically try to comfort it, “There-there… ooohhh I know…. Wait, where are you parents?!” For those of you who have children or have watched one you know that when a child is crying, we start checking. We have a process: we check the diaper first. Then we think about when they ate. If those fail, we check for a fever. Or we try burping, maybe they’re gassy.

As much as we want to pretend we’re more mature, we’re the same way. Sometimes we lose our rational minds, and we need a big person to help us figure out what’s wrong. Maybe we need to drink more water. Or vent. Or hear our words reflected back at us. Or maybe we’re just gassy.

Get in the habit that when you’re feeling out of balance, or moody, reach out to a mentor. A colleague who you met in this program. Someone to help you regulate your emotions and lead you back to kindness. Get in the habit of giving gratitude back to folks who help you. Write three thank you notes a week. It’s not random, it’s a strategic habit to put more kindness in the world.

That’s the whole of my faith. It’s why I chose to go into ministry–to put more kindness in the world. But even I need a good reminder. I love the story of the prophet Elijah who, at one point in his story, had enough. “God, I’m so mad and I want to die!” And God gave him some food, and Elijah slept and decided things aren’t so bad. Never underestimate the power of a nap and a snack and a big person to lead us back to kindness.

This is true for all people of all faiths and of no faith. For kindness is the most potent agent of change. It’s why we’re so afraid of it. Being kind and nurturing… well, people might take advantage of us. We have to guard ourselves against it. Be loud and demanding and insist on your own way. No. That’s what unregulated toddlers who need a nap and a snack do. Adults help kids regulate emotions.

Ronal Heifetz has stated that leaders are the adults in the room.[2] It’s our job to regulate the emotions. To help people and organizations become their best self. These things don’t happen on accident. It’s not random. It’s strategic.

Every big-picture effort… whether to sell more products or to solve large social problems requires strategy. It is hard, but far from impossible. I have great hope tonight, and I thank you for the reminder. I have hope for our future because maybe just one of you will continue your random acts. Stumble upon an insight. Get strategic with it. Reach out to your community who will nurture that insight into being and make your community, your state, your nation, the world better. I know it because it is the only way the world has ever changed for the better. No exceptions.

Thank you.

Works Cited

[1] For more on this, check out Death by Suburb by David Goetz

[2] Leadership on the Line or… some other book… Love his stuff.

Bibliography

Carrington, Jody. Braver Together; a free workshop on :discover. https://discover.teachable.com/workshops/braver-together

Heifetz, Ronald and Marty Linsky. Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Leading. Harvard Business Review Press, 2017.

Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone, The Collapse and Revival of American Community. Simon & Schuster, 2001.