Will B. Choosing Action Over Words

I was recently looking through Friends’ Facebook stories and saw a meme from my friend, Kevin Keene that hit home. It simply said, “the world is changed by your actions and not your opinions.”

Facebook is filled with opinions of every sort and depending on where you look; it tends to be the dominant postings, sometimes negative and sometimes positive. Certain pages, which most are probably familiar with, (cough) Rants and Raves (cough), seem filled with most people’s opinions. It is easy to give an opinion and sometimes hard to perform the actions that might be needed to help someone.

I am as guilty as the next person for sharing my opinions. I do work hard to balance this with action as much as possible. Sometimes, an opinion is needed in the right situations, but for making real changes in your environment, then action is a must.

There is a saying that children are blank sponges that soak up what they see and hear. The same can be said about the environments and communities we find ourselves in. Have you noticed when someone makes a negative comment that it usually starts a trend of others jumping on the wagon to chime in with their negative comments? Take a protest, for example, some are peaceful, but then someone takes it to a violent level and may throw a bottle or strike the opposition or destroy property, next thing you know the protesters turn into an angry mob of violence. That is an example of someone’s action influencing those around them into something negative. The same can be accomplished with positive actions. Say you wake up one day and decide that everything you do in this day will be a positive action to those around you. You smile at those you run across, hold a door open for a stranger, maybe buy a meal for someone behind you or maybe do some random act of kindness for someone, for example. These actions will have a positive reaction to those in your environment that could and most likely will cause a chain reaction of positive actions to the people you run across in your day.

Mark 12:31 says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.” If we all live by this one verse, think how amazing things would be. This is Will B. saying, smile when others frown, be happy when others are mad, and just try to help someone when they need help. It’s contagious.