REPAYING
KINDNESS

Topics: Kindness; Power; Retribution; Revenge

Reference: Luke 11:30–37

Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition to the Pacific Northwest in 1804 almost came to an untimely and deadly end. Half starved and almost frozen, the men staggered out of Idaho’s snowy Bitterroot Mountains into the camp of the Nez Perce Indians.

A chief named Twisted Hair had to decide what to do with the weak but wealthy strangers suddenly in their midst. According to the tribe’s oral tradition, some of the Nez Perce proposed killing the white men and confiscating their boxes of manufactured goods and weapons. The expedition’s rifles and ammunition would have instantly made the Nez Perce the region’s richest and most powerful tribe.

But an Indian woman came to the aid of the white men. As a young girl, she had been captured by an enemy tribe on the plains, who in turn sold her to another tribe. Eventually she was befriended and treated kindly by white people in Canada before escaping and making her way back to her own people. They called her Watkuweis, “Returned from a Faraway Country,” and for years she told them stories about the fair-skinned people who lived toward the rising sun. She was aged and dying by the time the explorers arrived.

When she learned about plans to destroy the expedition, this woman intervened. “These are the people who helped me,” she said. “Do them no hurt.”

A little kindness can have amazing and unexpected results.

—Marshall Shelley, Wheaton, Illinois