A few years back, I remember a bumper sticker campaign that urged me to practice “random acts of kindness.” I think the idea was that, by a lot of us doing so, we might collectively achieve something big – like world peace.

The campaign for random acts of kindness, kind of fizzled. I can guess why: it required creativity and initiative, kindness is a stretch for most of us, and probably (speaking as an ex-advertising person) it suffered from inadequate reach and frequency.

Just recently I’ve begun a new and very personal campaign. I have not planned it. I’d rather not name it at all, but for the purposes of a headline – I have. For want of a better name, let’s call it “impulsive acts of grace.” Unplanned, strongly-prompted, non-merit based showings of odd and unsolicited favor. (See, “impulsive acts of grace” works better.)

These impulsive acts have been offered with very little forethought on my part. Otherwise, I would have nixed them all.

Why give a charm off my favorite necklace to a rebellious, defiant eighteen-year-old who’s running from goodness as fast as his skinny legs will take him? Because, as I sealed up a letter to him, I felt a strong impulse to do so. Because its inscription “Jer. 29:13”in tiny letters seemed to speak his name. Will it matter in the long run? I doubt it. But it felt right, so I did.

It felt right, too, to push an elderly lady’s grocery cart back to the store after she’d slowly loaded several bags of Thanksgiving foodstuff into her car, trying to hold the cart, her hatchback and her balance all at once. “Would you like me to take that for you?” I asked her as I approached. “Oh, yes, thank you,” she said. She looked startled. So was I. I don’t usually slow down for that sort of nonsense.

It was even less like me to offer the whole zip lock bag of chocolate chip cookies I’d baked for therapeutic purposes and put in my car to take to the office, to a man at a stop light with a sign that said “homeless hungry please help.” The light stopped me not ten feet from him, and they suddenly weren’t cookies for the office anymore. I rolled down my window, leaned across the console and asked if some homemade cookies would be okay. I didn’t have to ask twice. “Bless you,” he said. And the light changed.

Would five dollars have helped more? Maybe. But I didn’t have cash. I had cookies. And the fleeting impulse to hand them over.

Will any of these nonsensical impulses change the world? No. But maybe, if I respond to that still, small voice more often, they will change me.

“While he was in Bethany, reclining at the table of a man known as Simon the Leper, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very expensive perfume, made of pure nard. She broke the jar and poured the perfume on his head.” (Mark 14:3, NASB)