RBA:
One kind word can warm three winter months. JAPANESE SAYING When I was in ninth grade, my big brother Hans, who was a junior in high school, seemed to me to be the epitome of popularity. He was good in sports and dated a lot. Our house was always filled with his cool friends, guys I dreamed would someday think of me as more than just “Hans’s dumb little kid sister.” Hans asked Rebecca Knight, the most popular girl in the school, to go with him to the junior prom. She accepted. He rented the tux, bought the flowers, and, along with the rest of his popular crowd, hired a limo and made reservations at a fancy restaurant. Then, disaster struck. On the afternoon of the prom, Rebecca came down with a terrible flu. Hans was without a date, and it was too late to ask another girl. There were a number of ways Hans could have reacted, including getting angry, feeling sorry for himself, blaming Rebecca, even choosing to believe that she really wasn’t sick and just didn’t want to go with him, in which case he would have had to believe that he was a loser. But Hans chose not only to be proactive but to give someone else the night of her life. He asked me—me! his little sister!—to go with him to his junior prom. Can you imagine my ecstasy? Mom and I flew about the house getting me ready. But when the limo pulled up with all of his friends, I almost chickened out. What would they think? But Hans just grinned, gave me his arm, and proudly escorted me out to the car like I was the queen of the ball. He didn’t warn me not to act like a kid; he didn’t apologize to the others; he ignored the fact that I was dressed in a simple short-skirted piano-recital dress while all of the other girls were in elegant formals. I was enchanted at the dance. Of course, I spilled punch on my dress. I’m sure Hans bribed every one of his friends to dance at least one dance with me, because I never sat out once. Some of them even pretended to fight over who got to dance with me. I had the greatest time. And so did Hans. While the guys were dancing with me, he was dancing with their dates! The truth is, everyone was wonderful to me the whole night, and I think part of the reason was because Hans chose to be proud of me. It was the dream night of my life, and I think every girl in the school fell in love with my brother, who was cool enough, kind enough, and self-confident enough to take his little sister to his junior prom.
If, as the Japanese saying goes, “one kind word can warm three winter months,” think how many winter months were warmed by this single act of kindness. You don’t have to look far to find opportunities for small acts of kindness. A young man named Lee, who was taught about the RBA, related this: I’m the junior class president at my school. I decided to try the small kindness deposit I learned about by putting a simple note in the boxes of just the student body officers I didn’t know well. I told them that I appreciated the work they did. They took me about five minutes to write up. The next day one of the girls I’d written a note to came up to me and abruptly gave me a big hug. She thanked me for the note, and handed me a letter and a candy bar. The note said that she had had a terrible day. She had a great deal of stress and was very depressed. My small note had turned her whole day around, helping her to happily accomplish the things that had caused her so much grief. The strange thing was that I had hardly known her when I gave her the note and I was sure that she didn’t like me anyway because she never really paid any attention to me. What a surprise! I couldn’t believe how much a simple note meant to her.
Small acts of kindness don’t always have to be one-on-one. You can also team up with others to make a deposit. I remember reading about a deposit the kids at Joliet Township Central High School near Chicago made in the life of an unsuspecting teenage girl named