More Than A Vacation - The One Year Daily Acts of Kindness Devotional

More Than a Vacation

I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other. Just as I have loved you, you should love each other.

John 13:34

She was on her way to Disney World with her young children when she got the devastating phone call: her husband, who wasn’t able to come with them, had died unexpectedly. After turning the car around, she spent the next week doing what she had never expected—planning a funeral rather than riding roller coasters with her kids.

Tim and I met her a few years later. My husband loves Disney World—it’s probably his favorite place in the world—and hearing her story, knowing that she’d never gotten the chance to experience the magic of Disney, struck a chord. Now that she was a single mom, money was tight and left little margin for things like trips.

So my husband and some of our good friends rallied a few local families around this idea: we’d pool our resources and buy her family a trip to Disney World. One of our friends bought the mom a card and put all the trip information inside. At church one Sunday, our friend passed the envelope to the mom and waited to hear what happened.

Thinking it was just a note, the mom didn’t open the card until she was in the parking lot. When she did, she just sat there and cried, and then she cried some more. Her daughter had just commented earlier that week that it would have been her dad’s fortieth birthday and he would have wanted them to take that trip eventually—but in the mom’s mind, it was out of reach.

For us, this act wasn’t so much about sending her on vacation as it was about letting her know that she was loved, that she mattered. We wanted her to know that although her husband had died and life had taken a turn she hadn’t expected, it didn’t mean that she or her dreams—for the future, for her children, or even for vacations to Disney World—had disappeared with him.

—Kristin

— Today’s Act of Kindness —

Is someone in your life grieving? Think of a way to honor them tangibly, then reach out to them in love.