Do We Have An Agenda?
—— Dr. James R. Kok
When you adopt the vision of Care and Kindness, you have something to do every day of the week. You have an agenda. You are not just going shopping —you are going to notice people and say a word, or reach out a hand. You’re going to have a new consciousness and it’s going to change you and change people for the better.
I guarantee that if you start, you will be able to do it and the world will be changed.
We began hosting the International Conference on Care and
Kindness in order to have a way to teach and to spread our vision. The
theme we use comes from the
title of my first book — “90% Of Helping Is Just Showing
Up”. That needs to be underlined and emphasized. God’s
people need to be there! You’ve got to show up in all those scary
places that you don’t know how to handle. Just show up — God
will take care of the rest. The goal of our conferences, then, is for
everyone to think care, think kindness.
Yes, of course we would like you to come to our conferences;
come back to more than one! We would like for you to regard the Conference
as a fueling station to which you may come to get recharged. But that’s
not our number one goal. 
We
would rather have you (if you have to make a choice) be spreading care
and kindness in your own community — being missionaries. This is
a mission that God’s people, church people, followers of Jesus,
are waiting for. All they need is to be pushed and nudged and encouraged
and inspired.
Well if 90% is just showing up, what is the other 10%?
That’s the question around which we design our conferences. Every conference, every seminar, every workshop and speaker you’ve heard, and will hear, is intended to make it more possible that you will reach out to a colleague, a friend, a neighbor, classmate, church member. We want to motivate you to move in the direction of hurting people. But we want you to be armed, equipped and more knowledgeable because of the things you have heard at the workshops and seminars.
In our workshops we teach how to listen, how to talk, how to pray, how to respond to heartbreaking situations. That’s the other 10%.
With
a better understanding of these things comes the satisfying ability to
help a hurting person. That’s what God wants us to do. We must go
there, but we need to know about how to say a caring word, how to pick
up on the feelings, how to help people cry out to God. The church throughout
the ages has tried to get people to quiet down, but we really need to
help people cry out. That’s what a good friend does. A good friend
cries out to God on behalf of her friend. She puts into words what she
hears her friend feeling and cries out to God on behalf of her friend.
C.S. Lewis says, “To love at all is to be vulnerable: love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken.
If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one. Wrap it up carefully with hobbies and little luxuries, avoid all entanglements, lock it up safely in the casket or coffin of your selfishness, but in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
The road to happiness always goes through the village of suffering; Some of the harder caring inevitably takes us there if life hasn’t already taken us there on our own. There are people who have never, ever done one scary, daring, caring act in their whole life. I would hate, as a Christian, a follower of Jesus, to show up at the Pearly Gates with that record.
We are called by God to live vulnerable lives, to risk
being hurt, rejected, exhausted, misunderstood, as we endeavor to connect
helpfully with others. These are the hazards and potholes on the road
to joy.
So the first step is to “just show up.” That’s 90% of
it right there. Be willing to walk alongside the hurting. Permit yourself
to share their pain.
Then try to do just a little bit more. Move into that area
of the 10% and acquire some skills, some tools that will be the right
things to say and do.
Do we have an agenda? Yes, we do! We want ever-increasing numbers of people
to catch this vision, put it into practice, and pass it on.
