"It takes courage to be kind.” --Maya Angelou
Kindness is an amazing and oh so needed virtue in our world now and always. Kindness happens when we treat another person with love, with care, with respect, honoring their dignity and worth as fellow human beings on the earth. For folks of faith like me, kindness is at the heart everything we believe and everything we do. You see, if I say I love God but then fail to love a neighbor, well, kindness loses. God loses in a way.
We’re living in times when it might be tempting to conclude that kindness is somehow out of fashion now. Kindness is too risky, or it feels scary in practice. Kindness is even a sign of weakness on our parts and not strength. Kindness just does not have the fortitude to survive in our sharp elbowed all too cynical world.
That’s wrong. Dead wrong.
Kindness still matters. Kindness is the most powerful energy to change this world for the good. Just ask folks like me who in less than two weeks will participate in the Pan Mass Challenge (PMC) charity bike ride across Massachusetts, the weekend of August 2-3rd. Thousands of us PMC folk—riders, volunteers, and donors—we will dare to be kind. To practice kindness that moves us to help those in need, folks battling cancer, people who love someone with cancer and neighbors and strangers who lost someone to cancer.
Thousands of riders from all over the country and world will get on their bikes, cinch up their helmets, and then ride tens of thousands of mile to be kind. To show folks who have been hurt by cancer that someone is on their side, pulling for them, praying for them and riding for them.
I’m a sixteen-year rider, been a church pastor for 35 years, and on this earth for 64 years, and I have never experienced such a huge and wonderful gathering of kind folks as I do in the PMC. We’ll try our best to both talk the talk of kindness and ride the ride of kindness too! If you’d like to donate, please follow the link for my ride at the end of this essay.
Here are some of the amazing numbers which mark the PMC.
$76 million: 2025’s fundraising goal to support research and care at Boston’s world class cancer institute, the Dana Farber (DFCI).
One-billion dollars plus: total money raised by the PMC since its first year, 1980.
One-half, as in fifty percent of all the new cancer drugs developed in the United States in the last five years came from the Dana Farber.
One hundred percent: when you give a dollar to the PMC, ALL OF IT goes directly to cancer care and research.
186 miles: the distance from Sturbridge to Provincetown, Massachusetts, the longest of the PMC rides this year.
78,000: the number of pedal strokes for an average rider like me to go that entire 186 miles, from the hills of central Mass to the dunes at the tip of the Cape.
6,800: the number of folks who will ride this year.
3,000: the number of volunteers who will support the PMC riders.
Priceless: with each mile pedaled our world gets closer to a cure for cancer and becomes a kinder place. So, on this upcoming August weekend, if you see PMC riders cycling the highways, byways, and hidden corners of the Bay State, please wave, smile, say a prayer, and remember that the main fuel which gets us all the way from start to finish is simple human kindness.
To donate to my ride: https://profile.pmc.org/JH0352
To make a general donation: https://donate.pmc.org/
(The views expressed in this essay do not necessarily reflect the views of the people and church I serve nor the United Church of Christ.)
The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.