Sometimes, a card or email can say it all.

"You are my favourite teacher." "Do you put baby oil on your head to make it shine?" "You have taught me so much." "I was scared of you in the sixth grade, but now you are my favourite teacher." "I love your sarcasm." "I love it when you roast other students." Of course, the cards included many sayings that I was famous for using in the classroom. All these things were in the fifty-six cards that my sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders wrote and gave me for my sixty-third birthday.

But my favourite came from a student I had taught throughout middle school but who had left our school when he began high school. And this email wasn't even for my birthday. It came after he learned that I had fallen and broken my femur.

Hey, Dr. Wiles. I just wanted to let you know that we're all praying for you and for your recovery to go well. You'll be back sooner than you know. Also, I just wanted to say your class is already helping me out so much in high school. I'm currently taking English 2. We had a parts of speech diagnostic pretest today, and it was basically a review from sixth-grade grammar. I will admit that I was the only 100, but it's probably because we didn't have to diagram each sentence. That was always the reason why I lost a few points on your tests. The teacher walked up to my desk and told me that I should be the one teaching this class because I probably knew more than her, but I wouldn't have known any of these questions without you. Anyway, I just wanted to say thank you for everything. Your class will stick with me for the rest of my life. I hope you have a great school year.

Of course, I forwarded this to my headmaster. Not to toot my horn, but he loves to hear testimonies about how our school prepares students for other schools, college, and life.

Proverbs 16:24 – Kind words are like honey — sweet to the soul and healthy for the body. (NLT)

I'm not a huge fan of honey, but it is sweet, and people often used it during the Great Depression years as a substitute for the hard-to-get sugar. Long before that, the writer of this proverb compared it to the nature of our words.

Somehow, I suppose speaking unkind words comes more easily because of our nature. We tend to see the bad in others rather than the good. We focus on the negative instead of the positive. We gossip rather than encourage. We put down instead of build up.

But what a better place our world would be if we'd all do as my students did. Not a bad card in the bunch! If they didn't like me or have anything good to say about me, they just didn't make the card. And there's a lot to be said about saying nothing when we have nothing good to say.

Saying kind things is easy once we make it a habit. Others appreciate it, we feel better, we tend to smile rather than frown, and the world becomes a more pleasant place in the process. So, go ahead and say a few kind things to someone daily.

How can we make it a habit to say kind things to others?

Prayer: Father, may the words of our mouths speak kindness to others. Amen.

Forward this devotional     Share on Facebook

About the author:

Martin Wiles <mandmwiles@gmail.com>
Greenwood, South Carolina, USA
Send your feedback to the author