It’s Randon Acts of Kindness Week.
    Monday was Valentine’s Day. In elementary school classrooms across the nation, young children exchanged Valentine cards and treats. They carefully decorated their Valentines boxes with pink and red construction paper hearts, then ripped them open to discover all of the treasures left inside by their best friends, secret admirers and maybe even a few playground enemies.
    Valentines Day is a day of love, of kindness and of pleasant surprises: Bouquets of flowers showing up at office buildings, surprise candlelit dinners, phone calls from long-distance friends.
    But every day is a good day to do something kind for someone else.
    The Random Acts of Kindness Foundation sponsors Random Acts of Kindness Week each year. This year it began Monday, Valentine’s Day, and lasts through Sunday. To celebrate, RAK is hosting the Extreme Kindness Challenge. The mission: do one act of kindness every day during Random Acts of Kindness Week.
    “The ‘extreme’ in our challenge is that we’re urging people to take their kind acts to extremes by committing to do a random act of kindness every day for a week,” said Marilyn Decalo, director of the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation in a press release. “We believe that encouraging extreme kindness in this way is our ticket to a kinder world.”
    The foundation is suggesting a different act of kindness each day this week and it’s not too late to begin. Visit www.randomactsofkindness.org to get started.
    The prompts are simple. For instance, Monday’s prompt, the first of Random Acts of Kindness Week, was to send a note of appreciation to someone who has touched your life. Tuesday’s prompt: to smile at 10 strangers.  If you don’t want to do their idea, but want to do something different of your own, that counts. If you can’t commit to doing all of the prompts, plan to do just one nice out-of-the-ordinary thing this week for a friend, family member, co-worker or a stranger.
    If you’re not up for the prompt they suggest, other ideas for acts of kindness include helping other shoppers, leaving quarters at the laundromat, letting other drivers merge or giving them a parking spot, donating old clothes or sporting goods, volunteering, babysitting for free, bringing your co- workers a treat, calling an old friend or recognizing outstanding service. The RAK website lists many more ideas.
    RAK is announcing the prompt each day of Random Acts of Kindness Week to its 25,000 Facebook fans, 60,000 online community members and via Twitter (@RAKFoundation) and will tally the efforts and update participants daily.
    “It’s a really exciting way to demonstrate how kindness can spread when we all take action. Our goal is to show how the light of kindness can be passed from one person to another, like a flame passing from candle to candle,” Dacalo said.
    Online at the Random Acts of Kindness Foundation, participants in the Extreme Kindness Challenge can log their kind actions and record how many people their kind acts have touched. The foundation also tracking kind acts on Twitter via the hashtag #dokindness.
    “We are urging our members to go online and share their actions and ideas,” Decalo added. “Inspiring others is an act of kindness in itself. Knowing someone else is participating is the best example and a great way to do kindness.”
    You can do kindness on your own, with anonymity, or as part of a group.
    I talked in December about the challenge our pastor issued to the congregation of doing something kind and out of the ordinary for someone else.
    Churchgoers went out into the community during the month of December, did a variety of kind things to help others, then wrote down what they did anonymously to put in a large box in the church. When it was all said and done, it was an outstanding total. Nearly 25,000 people were touched by the kindness of the congregation. It’s amazing how quickly small acts of kindness add up.
    Whether you join the Extreme Kindness Challenge for Random Acts of Kindness Week or you go on your own, kindness is always a good thing. Let’s try to find a way to do more of it and make someone’s day just a little bit brighter.