RAOK Experiment!

What the heck is RAOK?

Let me see if you can figure it out.

Last week as I was driving through the hood and I noticed a guy carrying a bag of cans.

I wrote about this collection process last fall.

It occurred to me one day that we collect a lot of cans at the Church.

I thought to myself what would happen if I took the bag of cans from the church and gave them to someone who was collecting cans on the street.

So last week when I stopped on the street and asked the man if he was collecting cans he said "yes" of coarse.

Just so you know I asked another guy the same question, but he thought I was crazy! Be careful. I mistook what was in his bag!

So back to the story I stopped and open up my trunk and gave him a large trash bag of cans.

His response was one of expletives that I dare not share, but he was VERY enthusiastic!

My next experiment came this past Saturday.

I saw a woman raking up some clippings from her cut shrubs.

I walked on by thinking about helping her. 

I would try to convince myself not to and keep on walking home.

This time I caught myself turning around and went up to her and asked if she needed help bagging the clippings.

She accepted the offer and we had a great time getting to know each other.

If you haven't figured it out yet RAOK stands for Random Acts of Kindness.

I want to see if RAOK will translate into opportunities of sharing the gospel.

At the minimum I will be planting seeds.

In Young Life Ministries they have a saying that "You have to earn the right to be heard".

You must first build trust.

This is not about how it makes me feel, but about how I can serve others.

I found a great website with all sorts of ideas for RAOK.

I am going to continue the RAOK experiment and see what happens.