A lot of people don’t know the difference between niceness and kindness.  They sound similar, but they couldn’t be more different.

The best example I’ve ever heard that illustrates the difference comes from a friend of mine while he was with the U.S. Special Forces fighting in Iraq.

He had a lot of different jobs while he was there, but sometimes his job was being the machine gunner on top of a humvee or a armored personnel carrier.  They had a lot of problems with enemies blending in with the crowd and finding ways to blow up vehicles with IEDs.  So my friend’s job in these situations was to make sure no one got within a certain distance of the vehicle and if they did, he had to kill them or risk terrible consequences for himself and his friends that he was supposed to protect.

As intimidating as a foreign military presence in your town must be, it is amazing what people can adjust to as normal.  People didn’t always pay attention as the vehicles were coming down the street because they had just gotten used to them – but this also put them in danger of getting too close and getting killed.

To prevent this as best he could my friend always kept with him in those situations a big box of .50 caliber shell casings (big pieces of scrap metal tubes) and he would throw them at people that weren’t paying attention or starting to get too close.  He would cuss at them and scream at them to keep them away.  He was the furthest thing from nice you could imagine.

But he was kind.

He was doing everything he could to save their lives.

Nice would have gotten them killed or endangered the people counting on him to keep them safe.

Niceness and kindness sound so similar but are completely different things.

Kindness is brave and prioritizes what is right and right relationships (what the Bible calls justice and righteousness).

Niceness masquerades as a virtue but it is either a symptom of a lack of courage, a lack of concern for what is right and just, or a naiveté about the bad, dark, and unhealthy things of this world – whatever the cause, it isn’t a good thing.  Niceness avoids conflict and gives space for the wrong – for tyrants and bullies.

A good and loving person isn’t nice or harmless.

If you look for a nice or harmless Jesus in the Bible you won’t find him.  Jesus wasn’t nice, but he was kind and he was just.  He spoke up for the oppressed and against injustice and told of a God that felt the same way about those things.  In the end people didn’t kill him because of his niceness and harmlessness, but because his kindness and courage was a threat – a threat the wrong people wanted to stop.

As you follow Jesus today, pray for courage and look for ways to be kind.