The Kindness Club

Some of the most necessary ingredients for a thriving society seem to be a bit scarce right now. Cantankerous human knots are everywhere we look . . .it’s hard sometimes to imagine a way to unravel it all. No matter the complexity of the problem (or the problem(s)), however, kindness never hurts. 

The following is an excerpt from my book The Compost File released earlier this year.

The best thing about being a major college basketball coach for a quarter of a century is the people the platform allows you to meet. Because I was the coach at Oklahoma, I had the opportunity to meet billionaires, world-renowned musicians, Hollywood movie stars, and Oprah (yup, she gets a category all her own). I’ve met incredibly intelligent people, side-stitch-funny people, eccentric, interesting people, and crazy artistic people, but I’ve never met anybody more impressive than the children and the families who I met at 1200 Children’s Avenue in Oklahoma City, the place where little people go to get well.

Through the years, my team and I had the privilege of hanging out with Batman, Superman and queens in various stages of their regalia. We had races down the hallways and puppet shows in the lobby. We played monumental games of Duck, Duck, Goose. We painted finger-and toenails, played video games, and shared our favorite songs. We named stuffed animals and played Hide and Seek with little green army men, while painting lots and lots of pictures, and making lots and lots of crafts.

And every time my team and I walked out of Children’s Hospital, we bounced out better people than we were when we strolled in.

Giving is tricky-slick like that. It can make a U-turn in mid-air. Newton’s Third Law says for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well... not really. Not at a Children's Hospital, anyway. There, when you empty the contents of a thimble, a five-gallon bucket comes back in return. We’d walk from the hospital to our cars every time with hearts so full we could barely shut the doors. Those tiny giants on the tenth floor doled out perspective like Walmart greeters do hellos. Unconditional love slopped all over every single thing they touched. It dripped from us on our drives back down the interstate toward home.

We learned a lot, my team and me, from the miniature superheroes at Children’s Hospital. Things like patience, courage, honesty and strength. They taught us about kindness, gratitude, resilience, faith, the power of prayer, and a level of peace that can only be found when we turn absolutely everything over to God. We learned a lot of things from a lot of different kids at a lot of different times throughout the years, but the one pervasive sort of non-negotiable that showed up without fail was how to be purely present wherever you are. Those kids sit in it. However ugly the it might be. And they wring the minutes dry. They don’t wallow. I’ve never met one who felt sorry for himself or whined about “why me?” Not one. And they fight—Lord, do they fight—with the kind of grit bound by sinew that we all wish our teams could have. These children are always exactly where they are. Planted. Present. Not scattered, as most of us visitors tend to be. It’s like these little angels scored a fast pass to wisdom with their admission bracelet to the tenth floor, a coupon that allows them to simply let it be.

We can learn a lot when we let ourselves be present. Even in—and perhaps especially in—the truly tough places where it’s scary and painful and impossible to understand.

It’s a truth commonly acknowledged by those in the problem-solving business that the people who have the problem usually know the most about what they need to solve it. Context matters. People living in the muck have context in spades. Kids with cancer are no exception. They can’t cure their own illnesses, but they often have some answers to some even bigger stuff. Bigger than childhood cancer? We can’t even imagine. But children frequently wear x-ray glasses that cut through all the crap. The heart of the matter tends to be where they most often strike.

Like my friend Keaton, for example. He was seven years old when he founded The K Club, five years after they found his leukemia. Going to the hospital was all this little man knew. So, in turn, he found going there quite grand. At Children’s, he ruthlessly charmed the nurses and entertained his peers while encouraging his parents and making the rounds to see all the patients who were new. At the Jimmy Everest Cancer Center at Children’s Hospital, Keaton Barron was a spreader of joy.

In January 2018, on the heels of five years of chemotherapy, radiation, T-cell therapy, medication, and doctors’ orders that made ant trails across his days, Keaton was admitted to the hospital for the flu. That’s when The K Club was born.

The K Club was the brainchild of Keaton and God’s special agent, Kay Tangner, who spends her days loving kids who are fighting for their lives. Together, she and Keaton carefully laid out all the rules. The membership fee would be one dollar, or “whatever a person can afford,” and the money would go to charity. Keaton designed and drew an official logo, named Strawberry Cereal Bars as the K Club snack, appointed therapy dogs as the K Club mascot, and designated the hospital chapel as the Clubhouse home. Together, the team of Keaton and Kay made membership cards to be used as kindness batons, complete with his trademark striped "K" on the front and the club’s Bible verse on the back. “Just so, let your light shine...” Matthew 5:16.

The original goal of The K Club was 1,000 members. As it turns out, though, that bar was kind of low. Within five months, the club paid for a fresh water well in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and bought part of a cow through Heifer International. They also provided balloons and gift cards for families and patients in the children’s ICU. The Kindness Club had members from all fifty states and several countries to boot. Keaton chaired the mission from his hospital bed for a while. And then from his bed at home before he went to meet his maker on May 11, 2018.

His star shot quickly across the Oklahoma sky, but it left an indelible trail.

In 2018, The K Club became an official corporation and then a full-fledged non-profit raising over $100,000 annually. Keaton’s parents, Luke and Holly, live his mission. The K Club is their kindness car, the vehicle that enables them to impact families who are sitting where they sat. Keaton knew, as do they, what sick kids need and what sick kids’ families have to have. So, there are Legos—lots and lots of Legos. And there are K Club hats and T-shirts because teams have to have team gear. There are balloons, care packages, scholarship funds for the ones who make it, and funeral funds for the ones who don’t.

This is just some of the stuff you can see. The stuff you can’t is impossible to list. Kindness, courage, compassion, and caring, those are the words of The K Club’s mission statement. That’s the pixie dust that keeps on falling from Keaton’s trail across the sky. He had no clue about how to hide from cancer or out-run it or how to keep it from doing whatever it is it wants to do. But it appears he knew a thing or two about the world. And he was here long enough to know that kindness can be the answer to all sorts of messed up things. So, he created a system that would help him spread the word long after he was gone. 

I keep a stack of K Club cards wrapped by a rubber band inside my purse. It’s my random-acts reminder to be kinder than I might be inclined. And to pass it on, just as Keaton intended when he burst across the sky.

As we near year end and our minds shift toward gratitude, please consider giving to Keaton’s Kindness Club @ https://www.kclubkindness.org/

P.S. Coming Soon… The Compost File on Audible. Here’s a taste…