A FATHER'S PROFOUND LESSON: THE WAY OF KINDNESS CALLS US TO BE RECEIVABLE

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Whoever receives you receives me, and whoever receives me receives him who sent me. — MATTHEW 10:40, ESV

For my father's final days, we checked him into a Boston hospice center, referring to it as "palliative care" to mask the gravity of his last home. It was a welcoming room housing a welcoming man, and visitors sensed in this antiseptic environment the purity of my father's affections. As long as he was cogent, he was also kind.

Loving-kindness was my father's greatest way to help others see their greatest yearning: knowing the grace of God the Father. For him, it always began by making himself what he called "receivable." When he went into the receivable mode, he would reach out to others with love that could only be described as divine. That life of being receivable is the starting point for the life of kindness. And as his life flashed before my eyes on that last night, I recalled one of the most profound lessons he ever taught me.

My father lived the receivable life, but he talked to me about it only once. One somewhat ordinary conversation on an early morning walk with him in Bangladesh stands out as that transformative moment when I began to grasp how his acts of being receivable were the first steps toward kindness.

I was researching in Bangladesh for several months when my father visited for a few days, traveling with my mother between missionary stops in Madras and Singapore. I was in my late twenties, ponytailed and single. Each morning before breakfast, he and I descended the staircase from the small flat I leased and stepped onto the streets of Dhaka, one of the world's poorest and most densely populated cities. On our walk we passed half-constructed homes framed by bamboo scaffolding. Dumpsters were permanent, not portable, made of brick and rummaged through simultaneously by dogs and children and widows. Open drains on each side of the street reeked of human waste, and rickshaw peddlers dodged us as we walked our morning route.

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