I picked up Pastor Yvonne Barnes’ book, The Kindness Code, a few weeks ago. Not because I felt particularly kind, but more because I felt the opposite. Tired. Short. Like I had nothing left to give.
You know that feeling where even saying “hello” to someone feels like a transaction you didn’t agree to?
I left it on my nightstand for a while. The cover stared at me. I kept thinking kindness is one of those words that sounds nice in theory but in practice gets messy. Because being nice to people who are nice to you? That’s easy. That’s not even a choice, really. It’s just… reacting.
But I finally cracked it open one night when I couldn’t sleep. And I landed on something that just sat there in the room with me for a while. Barnes writes about how you can’t change people because people have to want to change. She doesn’t dress it up. She just says it plain.
I read that line maybe four times.
Because I’ve been that person. The one who stays in a friendship or a work situation or even a family dynamic thinking if I just try harder, if I just explain it better, if I just care more… they’ll get it. They’ll see the problem and fix it. But that’s not how it works. She doesn’t say it like a lecture. She says it like someone who learned it the hard way. And I think that’s why it landed.
A few pages later, she talks about something else that got under my skin. She says when you fail to forgive because you think every experience has to last forever, you get stuck. Not just emotionally stuck—like, actually stuck. You become the pain. Not carrying it. Becoming it.
I had to put the book down after that one.
There was a silence in my house that night. Just the fridge humming. And I thought about a falling out I had with someone two years ago. I wasn’t the one who started it. But I also wasn’t the one who let it go. I kept replaying it. Kept proving to myself I was right. And Barnes doesn’t say “just forgive and move on” like it’s a slogan on a coffee mug. She says when you hold onto that stuff, you hurt yourself from receiving the very thing you say you want—which is peace. Which is movement. Which is to stop being defined by the worst thing that happened to you.
The Kindness Code isn’t really about being soft. That’s what I expected. But it’s actually about being honest. About looking at your own part in things. There’s a quote—I think it’s quote 89—where she says reality is when you evaluate the matter and see where you had a part in it. Not where they had a part. You.
I don’t like that. I’ll be honest. My first instinct is always to list what the other person did wrong. My second instinct is to list it again with more detail. But Barnes keeps pulling the mirror back around. And it’s annoying. In a good way.
She also talks about how you can’t keep offering your full self—your “gallon size,” she calls it—to pint-sized people. That made me laugh. Not a happy laugh. A tired one. Because I’ve done that so many times. Poured out everything I had for someone who wasn’t even looking for a cup. And then wondered why I felt empty.
That’s not kindness. That’s just poor boundaries dressed up as generosity.
Later in the book, she talks about how people will sometimes erupt what needs to be changed in you. Not because they’re evil. Just because they bump up against the places you haven’t dealt with. And I’ve seen that happen. Someone will say something small—nothing cruel, just honest—and suddenly I’m furious. And it takes me two days to realize I wasn’t mad at them. I was mad because they were right about something I didn’t want to admit.
I think that’s the quiet work of The Kindness Code. It’s not about performing kindness for applause. It’s about the unglamorous stuff. Forgiving someone who didn’t apologize. Letting a friendship fade because it became a season of release, not failure. Being the truth in a relationship instead of just demanding truth from the other person.
There’s a line near the end—quote 90, I think—where she says if you want the truth, be sure you’re the truth. And that wrecked me a little. Because I want honesty from everyone else. But I’m not always honest about my own exhaustion, my own resentment, my own fear of being left out.
So here’s what I’m sitting with now.
Kindness, real kindness, might start with other people. But it lives or dies based on what you do with yourself when no one’s watching. When you’re just sitting in the quiet. When you have to decide whether to replay an old wound or actually let it finish its purpose and go.
The Kindness Code didn’t give me a 5-step plan. It gave me a headache in the best way. The kind where you realize you’ve been standing in your own way for years and calling it protection.
I’m still not good at it. But at least now I know what the work actually is.
