That best portion of a good man's life, his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and of love. William Wordsworth (1770-1850).

Remember the last time you were in an argument with someone and one of you said, “You always do that!” The accused probably responded with something like, “Name one time I did that.” This is usually an effective retort not because the accused has in fact never committed the alleged act but rather because the accused has committed it so often that the accuser can not recall any one incident. The alleged behavior is so prevalent that those closest to the accused simply accept it as part of his or her basic makeup until it they deem it useful in proving a point in an argument.

Of course, the alleged behavior can not be that big of a deal or other people would not associate with the accused. For instance, no one would say, “Every time we go to a dinner party, you always murder the host!” Therefore you would never hear someone say, “Name one time I murdered our host!” Instead, the alleged behavior is usually something that is either annoying or, at worst, a breach of etiquette. You might say, “Every time we go to a dinner party, you always go back for seconds before some people have even had firsts!” When the accused responds, “Name one time I went back for seconds before some people had firsts!” the accuser will have the recollections of every dinner party they have attended flooding into his or her mind and this flood will likely preclude the clear recollection of a specific event.

Imagine if the flood of memories were not of undesirable behaviors but of acts of kindness or generosity. Imagine having a relationship with someone who was always being thoughtful and kind. Imagine not being able to recall a single nice thing that person had done not because he or she had never done anything nice but because every thing they did was nice. It’s easy to see why we would all love to have a relationship with someone like that. What is more difficult to understand is why we don’t think that the other people in our relationships would like to think that about us. We think things like, “I wish my husband would bring me flowers just because he loved me, not because it’s Mothers’ Day,” or “I wish my boss would tell me that he likes the job that I do a little more often than at my annual evaluation,” when we should be thinking, “What can I do that would make my spouse’s day a little bit easier,” and “How can I help someone at work do their job a little better.”

When Jesus calls upon us to, “Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven,” He is not calling us to commit random acts of kindness or occasional acts of generosity, He is calling us to be constantly kind and pervasively generous. When we do an isolated good deed, our light will shine in such a way that people will see it and think, “Oh, what a nice thing to do.” When we live the true Christian life, people may not be able to single out any one good thing that we have done, but they will see the power of God at work in our lives.