Kindness and permissiveness are semantically related. Permissiveness can be indifferent, it's passive, it's a choice to allow for some degree of freedom. Kindness is an active choice, it's outwardly showing some degree of forbearance. Another word for both kindness and permissiveness is indulgence. So, as far as I can see, kindness and permissiveness sends messages of tolerance for something that is most likely intolerable, something less than virtuous, or it wouldn't require of others either permission or kindness. Either choice is typically born from some shared understanding about feelings of conflict and confusion. Not just in commiseration, but in imaging having to live within that state. Putting oneself in the shoes of another.
Relationships are incredibly complex, and the choices we make are both profoundly creative and self destructive at the same time. A single snowflake can bend the bamboo leaf. We never know just how much some small act of kindness, or silence, can impact justice. Kindness to accumulate thanks, or to be seen as being kind, is self-serving. Permission is judgment without consequence. Whether we like it or not, kindness, permissiveness, both come with judgment. They carry weight. Like that last tiny snowflake that lands upon the snow that's been accumulating on the bamboo leaf. Alone it weighs very little. And yet it bends the leaf.
Justice, turns out, is the consequence of kindness and permissiveness. There is only one act that can truly resolve this impartial dilemma. It's not kindness, nor permissiveness, both of which are not impartial. It's grace, unmerited divine regeneration. Not privilege, but pardon. Not fairness, but clemency. Not indulgent, but merciful. Not equity, but conformity to truth.
Kindness and permissiveness, it's like telling time to stop, or better yet reversing towards a new more palatable choice.
Q:
What is the truly fairest of all shakes?
A:
Justice.
It's to give way for the truth to be experienced and lived out, choosing to act justly. It's full stop eternal, not messing around with the order of things.
Micah 6:8
He has shown you, O mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly with your God