Kindness rarely makes headlines, yet it can change the direction of a life. Scripture lists it among the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–23) and calls us to "be kind and compassionate to one another" (Ephesians 4:32).
These ten stories about kindness and compassion, retold in our own words, show how a parcel, a piano, a string of anonymous gifts, a deliberate foul, a child's tears, a dying enemy, a monk's protest and a barefoot girl became turning points, alongside two stories that raise hard questions about how the church treats people. Each ends with a takeaway for sermons or reflection.
Stories in this collection:
- The Twelve Days of Christmas: Gifts for a Grieving Mother
- The Red Mahogany Piano
- The Parcels That Shaped a Pulitzer Prize Winner
- Cory Weissman's Free Throw: Rivals Who Chose Kindness
- "I Just Stopped to Help Her Cry"
- Enemies No More: A Scene from All Quiet on the Western Front
- Telemachus: The Monk Who Stopped the Games
- "Take Your Shoes Off": How One Leader Made Room for a Barefoot Girl
- Mel White: A Gay Minister and the Church He Once Served
- "Dear Dr Laura": A Letter About Reading the Bible Selectively
The Twelve Days of Christmas: Gifts for a Grieving Mother
A true story told by Caryl Harvey. We retell it in our own words.
Early one morning in September 1995, Caryl and Charlie Harvey answered a knock at their front door. Two police officers stood there with terrible news: their twenty-year-old son, Chad, had been found murdered.
Numb with grief, they somehow got through the funeral and the weeks that followed. But as Christmas approached, Caryl found herself pouring out her anger and disappointment towards God. He had failed her, she felt. Why hadn't he protected her son, when she had prayed for him so often?
In desperation she prayed that if God cared about her at all, she needed a miracle. Otherwise, she felt, she might not survive. She waited. And that Christmas, her miracle came.
One evening the doorbell rang. When Caryl's thirteen-year-old daughter, Sarah, opened the door, there was nobody there, only a gift with no name on it. It was a tree branch with apples attached, and a blue plastic bird perched on top. A note attached to it played on the old carol, "The Twelve Days of Christmas". The sender explained, with gentle humour, that they could not find a partridge and their pear tree had died, so the family would have to make do with a bluebird in an apple tree. With it came a Bible verse about the birth of John the Baptist.
The next evening the bell rang again. Sarah raced to the door, but once again the giver had vanished. This time there was a box of turtle-shaped sweets and two chocolate bars from a brand named after doves, for the second day's two turtle doves, along with a Bible verse about the angel Gabriel appearing to Mary.
And so it went on, night after night, for twelve nights. On the third day came three small hens, with a note joking that the French hens had lost their passports. On the fourth came a cassette of songs with the word bird in their titles. Five golden rings turned out to be five freshly made doughnuts. Six geese a-laying were six painted eggs, and seven swans swam across a blue-iced cake.
Eight maids a-milking became a candle shaped like a cow. For nine ladies dancing there were gingerbread figures decorated as dancers, with a joke about equal opportunities explaining why there were more than nine of them. Ten lords a-leaping were wooden jumping puppets, eleven pipers piping arrived as a recording of flute music, and on the twelfth night came twelve drums made of iced biscuits. And every night there was another verse of Scripture, leading the family step by step towards the story of Christmas.
Caryl came to see that this was the miracle she had asked for. For the first time since Chad's death, she found herself looking forward to the next day, wondering what would arrive. Looking back, she said that when she could not talk to God, and did not even want to, he had sent her a miracle through someone else. God used human hands to deliver it, she said, but his fingerprints were all over it.
Her story reminds us that when people are deeply wounded, our quiet actions can become a miracle to them. Often, like Caryl, they cannot reach out to God for themselves. But we can carry his grace to their door.
Caryl later said that she never fully learned who had sent the gifts, and in a sense that was part of their power. The givers asked for nothing in return, not even thanks. They simply kept showing up, night after night, for a grieving family they knew needed to be reminded that they were not forgotten.
Takeaway: People in deep grief often cannot reach out to God themselves. Our quiet, persistent kindness can carry his love to them until they can.
Source: Caryl Harvey's own account in a Christian magazine, late 2001 (as cited in our source collection; we could not locate the original article online).
The Red Mahogany Piano
A popular story attributed to a piano salesman named Joe Edwards. It has been widely circulated, and we have not been able to confirm its details.
Many years ago, the story goes, a young man named Joe Edwards worked as a salesman for a piano company in St Louis, Missouri. The company sold pianos all over the state by advertising in small-town newspapers. When enough replies came in from one area, the salesmen would load up their trucks, drive out and sell pianos to the people who had written.
Every time the company advertised in the cotton country of south-east Missouri, it received a postcard from an elderly woman. Please bring me a new piano for my little granddaughter, it said. It must be red mahogany. I can pay ten dollars a month from my egg money. She filled the whole card with her handwriting and then turned it over and kept writing round the edges of the front, until there was barely room for the address.
Of course, the company could not sell a new piano for ten dollars a month. No finance company would accept such small payments, so the postcards were ignored.
One day, though, Joe happened to be in that area visiting other customers, and out of curiosity he decided to find the old woman. He found what he expected. She lived in a one-room sharecropper's cabin in the middle of a cotton field. It had a dirt floor, and chickens wandered in and out. She had no car, no phone and no steady job, nothing but a roof over her head, and not a very good one. Her granddaughter was about ten years old, barefoot and wearing a dress made from a feed sack.
Joe explained gently that he could not sell her a new piano for ten dollars a month, and that she should stop sending the postcards. He drove away heartsick. But his advice made no difference. Every six weeks the same postcard arrived, asking for a red mahogany piano and promising she would never miss a payment.
A couple of years later, Joe had his own piano company. When he advertised in that region, the postcards started coming to him. For months he ignored them. Then one day, when he was in the area, something came over him. He had a red mahogany piano on his truck. Knowing he was about to make a terrible business decision, he drove it to the cabin and told the old woman that he would carry the contract himself: ten dollars a month, no interest, fifty-two payments.
He carried the piano inside and placed it where he thought the roof was least likely to leak on it. He asked the woman and the little girl to keep the chickens off it, and he drove away, sure he had just thrown away a new piano.
But the payments came, every one of the fifty-two, just as she had promised. Sometimes they arrived as coins taped to a small card in an envelope.
Joe forgot about it for twenty years. Then one evening he was in Memphis on business. After dinner at his hotel he went into the lounge and heard the most beautiful piano music. A lovely young woman was playing a fine grand piano.
A pianist himself, Joe was amazed by her skill, and he moved to a table near her to listen. She smiled at him, took requests, and during her break she came and sat at his table. Aren't you the man who sold my grandmother a piano a long time ago? she asked.
At first it meant nothing to him. Then, as she explained, he remembered. It was the little barefoot girl in the feed-sack dress.
She told him her name was Elise. Her grandmother could not afford lessons, so she had learned to play by listening to the radio. She had begun playing at the church she and her grandmother walked more than two miles to attend, then at school. She had won awards and a music scholarship. Now she was married to a lawyer in Memphis, and he had bought her the beautiful grand piano she was playing that night.
Then something else occurred to Joe. It's a bit dark in here, he said. What colour is that piano?
It's red mahogany, she replied. Why?
Joe sat there in the dim lounge for a long moment, lost for words. The piano he had thought was a foolish loss had become the beginning of a whole life of music. Whether or not every detail of the story happened exactly as it is told, it captures something true: a kindness that makes no business sense can bear fruit we may never see, and sometimes, years later, it finds its way back to us.
Takeaway: A kindness that seems like a bad investment can shape someone's whole future. We rarely see the harvest, but God does.
Source: Popular story attributed to Joe Edwards; widely circulated, original source unknown.
The Parcels That Shaped a Pulitzer Prize Winner
Geraldine Brooks won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her novel March. Her love of books, she has said, was nurtured by a woman she never met, Althea Glasby, a friend of her grandfather's.
One day, the story goes, Geraldine's grandfather happened to mention to Miss Glasby that his little granddaughter loved to read. From then on, a parcel arrived for Geraldine every birthday and every Christmas.
Each parcel held a beautifully bound, lavishly illustrated book, carefully chosen for her. And on the inside cover of each one, in elegant flowing handwriting, was the same inscription: To Geraldine, with love from Althea Glasby.
Geraldine never met her. She had no idea what moved this woman to spend so much time and thought on a child she did not know.
Years later, as an acclaimed author, she wrote that she wished she could thank her in person. She wished she could tell her how those books had strengthened a love of words that grew into a career and a calling. She said she would like to give Miss Glasby one of her own books, a fine hardback first edition, signed, not in such beautiful handwriting as hers, but with a heartfelt thank-you for the gifts that had helped lead her into a life of books.
It was a small kindness, repeated faithfully, and she never knew its full effect.
Takeaway: Small, faithful kindnesses to children can shape the course of a life. You may never see the result, but the seed still grows.
Source: As recounted in Mark McCrindle, The Power of Good (Hybrid Publishers, 2011).
Cory Weissman's Free Throw: Rivals Who Chose Kindness
In February 2012, Cory Weissman led the men's basketball team of Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania onto the court for the last game of the season.
Four years earlier, as a freshman, he had suffered a stroke that left him paralysed down one side of his body. After years of rehabilitation he could walk again, with a limp, but he could not play competitive basketball. Before the stroke he had been a promising member of the team, and as his senior year drew to a close, his coach wanted to give him a few seconds on the court.
So Cory was named captain and led out the starting five for what would be both his first and his last game for Gettysburg, since he was about to graduate.
Everyone in the gym knew how hard he had fought just to be there. The crowd and the players from both teams greeted him with wild applause. The coach gave him a few moments on court before bringing him off.
With about a minute left, Gettysburg was well ahead, and the coach sent Cory back on. Then the opposing coach, Rob Nugent of Washington College, called a time-out and told his players to foul Cory deliberately. For those who do not know basketball, that was a generous act: being fouled meant Cory would get two free throws at the basket.
Cory stepped up to the free-throw line. He felt the weight of the ball in his hands, lifted it and shot. It missed badly. But he had one more attempt. Again he steadied himself, raised the ball and shot. This time it dropped straight through the hoop, and the gym erupted in thunderous applause.
Afterwards, an athletics administrator at Gettysburg wrote to Washington College to thank them. He said that their coach, staff and players had shown a level of compassion he had never witnessed in more than thirty years of college sport.
Takeaway: Kindness sometimes means giving up a small advantage so someone else can have their moment. Winning well matters more than simply winning.
Source: Frank Record, "When There's More to Winning Than Winning", NPR, 21 February 2012.
"I Just Stopped to Help Her Cry"
A little girl was late home for dinner. Her mother, as worried parents do, demanded to know where she had been.
The girl explained that she had stopped to help her friend Janie, whose bicycle had been broken in a fall.
But you don't know anything about fixing bicycles, her mother said.
I know, the little girl replied. I just stopped to help her cry.
Sometimes that is all kindness needs to be.
Takeaway: Compassion does not always fix things. Often it simply refuses to let someone suffer alone. Paul tells us to "mourn with those who mourn" (Romans 12:15).
Source: Traditional story; author unknown.
Enemies No More: A Scene from All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, is set among German soldiers in the First World War. It contains one of the most moving scenes in all war literature.
During an attack, the young German soldier Paul Bäumer takes cover in a shell crater in no-man's land. A French soldier tumbles into the crater beside him, and in panic Paul stabs him. Then he is trapped there with the dying man for hours, unable to leave because of the fighting overhead.
As the Frenchman lies dying, Paul's fear turns to horror and then to compassion. He gives the man water from his canteen and tries to bandage his wounds. When the soldier dies, Paul goes through his wallet and finds his name, Gérard Duval, a printer, and photographs of his wife and little daughter. He promises the dead man that he will write to his family.
In that crater the two men cease to be enemies. Paul sees the soldier in a completely new way: not as an enemy combatant, but as a husband and a father, someone who loves and is loved. Someone just like him.
That is always the path to peace and reconciliation: learning to truly see the other person, and recognising in them someone like ourselves.
Takeaway: Compassion begins when we see the person behind the label. Once we recognise someone as just like us, it becomes much harder to treat them as an enemy.
Source: Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (1929).
Telemachus: The Monk Who Stopped the Games
The story of Telemachus is told by the fifth-century church historian Theodoret. Telemachus was a monk from the East who travelled to Rome around the year 400.
While he was there, he noticed crowds flocking to the arena to watch gladiators fight. He followed them inside and was horrified by what he saw.
According to later tellings, the games were part of celebrations of a military victory. Men armed with swords and spears fought one another to the death for the entertainment of the crowd. When a gladiator was wounded, his opponent would stand over him, waiting for the crowd to decide whether he should live or die. Between bouts, the bodies were dragged away and fresh sand was thrown over the blood.
Telemachus watched as men died and the crowd cheered. Then he could stand it no longer. The robed monk made his way down into the arena itself, ran between two fighting gladiators and tried to pull them apart. He begged them to stop their murderous sport, and called on the crowd not to break God's law against killing.
The response was furious. The crowd shouted him down and demanded that the fighting continue. When Telemachus kept standing between the fighters, the angry spectators turned on him. In some versions the gladiators cut him down; in Theodoret's account, the crowd stoned him to death.
But his death was not in vain. According to Theodoret, when the emperor Honorius heard what had happened, he honoured Telemachus as a martyr and put an end to gladiatorial combat. Historians debate exactly when and how the gladiator games finally ended, but Telemachus's protest has been remembered ever since as one of the moments that helped bring them to a close.
One man, with no power, no army and no position, simply refused to stay silent in the face of cruelty. He paid for it with his life, yet his single act of courage is still remembered more than sixteen centuries later. His story asks each of us what cruelty we have grown used to, and whether we are willing to step into the arena to stand against it.
Takeaway: Compassion is not only a feeling. Sometimes it means stepping into the arena, at real cost, to say that human life matters.
Source: Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History (5th century); later retold in Foxe's Book of Martyrs.
"Take Your Shoes Off": How One Leader Made Room for a Barefoot Girl
A story told in many churches; its original source is unknown.
One Sunday morning, a leader in a church children's programme noticed a little girl standing outside the doorway. She was looking in with great longing at the games and fun the other children were having, but she would not come in.
The leader went out and invited her to join them. They'll all laugh at me, the girl said.
Why do you think that, sweetheart? the leader asked.
Because I don't have any shoes, the girl whispered.
The leader's heart broke at the little girl's poverty. She knew how much the child wanted to join in, and she tried to reassure her that the other children would not laugh. But no matter what she said, she could not persuade the girl to come inside.
Then another leader came over, someone known for his gift with children in difficult situations. He took the little girl aside and talked quietly with her for a moment.
Then he went back into the room to lead the next activity. Before he started, he made an announcement. All right, everyone, he said, before we go any further, I want you all to take off your shoes and socks and put them by the wall. For the rest of today, we're all going barefoot.
The little girl's face lit up. She ran into the room and joined in with everyone else.
He had not argued with her, lectured the other children or drawn attention to her poverty. He had simply changed the room, so that the thing that set her apart no longer mattered.
Takeaway: True kindness does not just invite people in; it removes the barriers that keep them out. Paul wrote that he became "all things to all people" so that he might reach them (1 Corinthians 9:22).
Source: Traditional story; author unknown.
Mel White: A Gay Minister and the Church He Once Served
This story touches on questions about sexuality on which Christians hold deeply different convictions. We tell it as Mel White has told it, without taking a side on the theological debate, because it raises important questions about how the church treats people. It also mentions attempted suicide; if that affects you, please see the note at the end.
Mel White is an American minister and author. For many years he was a well-known figure in conservative evangelical circles. After seminary and a doctorate, he worked as a writer and ghostwriter for some of the most prominent names in American evangelicalism, including Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and Billy Graham.
According to his autobiography, Stranger at the Gate, White first realised he was attracted to other boys when he was about twelve, and it terrified him. He had been taught that homosexuality was a terrible sin, and he spent the next thirty years fighting his feelings.
He did what he believed was expected of him. He married a woman he loved, had children and built a rich family life. But from early on, he and his wife knew something was wrong. They searched desperately for a cure. He tried counselling and prayer, fasting and anointing. He underwent aversion therapy and other treatments. He took part in prayers for deliverance. He wanted desperately not to be gay. Nothing changed.
Eventually, after decades of struggle, he fell into despair and attempted to take his own life. While he was recovering, his wife urged him to choose life. The couple agreed to separate on loving terms. White later entered a long-term relationship with a man, said he had reconciled his faith and his sexuality, and remained close to his children. He went on to serve as a minister in the Metropolitan Community Church, a denomination that welcomes gay and lesbian Christians, and founded an organisation, Soulforce, to campaign for their acceptance in the church.
When his story became public, the reaction from many of his former colleagues was harsh. Writing contracts were cancelled, phone calls went unanswered, letters arrived condemning him, and some former friends refused even to shake his hand.
In the years that followed, White continued to write and speak publicly about faith and sexuality, and through Soulforce he organised peaceful protests and conversations with church leaders, arguing that the church should listen to gay and lesbian Christians rather than simply talk about them.
Christians respond to Mel White's story in very different ways. Many affirm his conclusions and see his journey as one of finding peace with how God made him. Many others hold to the church's traditional teaching that sexual relationships belong only within marriage between a man and a woman, and would counsel a different path, while still grieving his suffering. Whatever we believe about those questions, his story confronts every Christian with another one: how do we treat people who are struggling, who disagree with us, or whom we believe to be wrong? Do they find in us the compassion of Christ?
Takeaway: Jesus was known as a friend of those others shunned (Luke 7:34). Whatever our convictions, we are called to speak the truth in love and to treat every person with dignity. If you are struggling with thoughts of harming yourself, please reach out to someone you trust or to a local crisis line.
Source: Mel White, Stranger at the Gate: To Be Gay and Christian in America (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
"Dear Dr Laura": A Letter About Reading the Bible Selectively
This is a satirical letter that circulated widely on the internet around 2000. Its author is unknown. It is aimed at one particular argument, and Christians on all sides of the debate about sexuality have responded to it. We summarise it in our own words.
Dr Laura Schlessinger is an American radio host known for her blunt moral advice. In the late 1990s she was widely reported to have described homosexuality as an abomination, citing Leviticus 18:22 as if that verse settled the matter.
In response, an anonymous writer composed a mock letter of thanks. With a straight face, the writer thanked her for teaching people about God's law, and said that whenever anyone defended homosexuality, he simply quoted Leviticus to end the debate. But he needed her advice, he said, on how to obey some of the other laws in the same books.
He asked, for example, how to deal with neighbours who complained about the smell when he burned a bull on an altar as an offering, since Leviticus says the aroma pleases the Lord. He asked what a fair price would be if he sold his daughter into slavery, as a law in Exodus seems to allow. He asked how he was supposed to know when a woman was ritually unclean, since asking seemed to offend people.
He went on. Leviticus allows Israelites to buy slaves from neighbouring nations, he noted; did that apply to his own neighbouring countries? A neighbour kept working on the Sabbath, for which Exodus prescribes death; was he personally obliged to carry out the sentence? A friend thought eating shellfish was a lesser abomination than homosexuality; could she settle the dispute? And since another law barred people with defective eyesight from approaching the altar, did his reading glasses disqualify him?
He closed by thanking her again for reminding everyone that God's word is eternal and unchanging.
A scene inspired by the letter even appeared in the American television drama The West Wing in 2000, and the text was copied in countless emails, which is one reason its authorship has never been established.
The letter is clever and funny, and it makes a serious point: no Christian keeps every law in the Old Testament, so we cannot simply quote a single verse without asking how the whole Bible should be interpreted and applied after Christ.
At the same time, many Christians who hold traditional views have pointed out that the church has long distinguished between the ceremonial and civil laws given to ancient Israel and the moral teaching it believes continues, including teaching on sexuality found in the New Testament. The letter does not settle that debate. But it is a sharp reminder to read Scripture carefully, humbly and as a whole, rather than using isolated verses as weapons.
Takeaway: Scripture calls us to "correctly handle the word of truth" (2 Timothy 2:15). Whatever we believe, we should read the Bible as a whole and speak about others with humility and compassion.
Source: Anonymous satirical letter circulated online, c. 2000.
Final thoughts
Twelve nights of gifts, a piano on credit, a parcel of books, a deliberate foul, a child's tears, a dying enemy, a monk in the arena, a room full of bare feet, a minister rejected by his friends and a letter about reading the Bible. Each asks how we treat the person in front of us. Who could you surprise with kindness, or simply sit beside, this week?
For further reading, Sopranu has a summary of C. S. Lewis's The Four Loves, which explores the kind of self-giving love these stories describe.
Who could you surprise with kindness, or simply sit beside, this week?
More stories you may like:
These stories are retold in our own words for teaching and reflection. Sources are credited under each story.
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