Doing Small Things with Great Love

It was Mother Teresa who said, “In this life we cannot do great things.  We can only do small things with great love.”  And yet seems to go completely against human nature.  We don’t want to do small things.  We want to do big things!  Huge things!

I don’t know if it’s our pride or our compassion (or some combination of the two) but little things don’t seem to cut it.  It’s almost as though the small things aren’t worth it, that they don’t make a “big enough” difference.  We all want to change the world, but how many of us believe we can?  We think in terms of the big picture, in terms of big things, and suddenly the desire for big change is overwhelmed the size of the effort and resources and (insert your favorite obstacle here) that would be required.  And sadly, most of the time, we are either paralyzed or demoralized into doing nothing.

Mother Teresa had it right (I know, hardly a shocker) – we must do small things.  We must overcome the thoughts that tell us no to bother, or that it won’t matter and fight the small battles.  Jesus did.  We (naturally) tend to think of Jesus as rising from the dead and performing miracles, but He did millions of small things that we can look to as hope and/or inspiration when we need it.

Remember that Jesus spent 30 years in the small town of Nazareth.  I can guarantee you two things.  One, that He did lots of small things there.  And two, that He did them all with great love.  Picking up supplies for His carpentry work, going to the market, hundreds of small acts to make life easier for Mary and Joseph – there are so many things He did not fit for the Redeemer of the world!  But He did them anyway, and He did them with great love.  May this thought inspire us to live our lives doing the small things, since after all, “to God there is nothing small.”

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Faith and the Dark Night of the Soul

In “Abandonment to Divine Providence” (a book I highly, highly recommend!) Jean-Pierre de Caussade writes, “The life of faith is the untiring pursuit of God through all that disguises and disfigures him and, as it were, destroys and annihilates him.”  An amazingly powerful quote and yet at the same time not something we want to hear.  If were honest we’d probably admit that we’d like faith to be easy, to sail through pain and hardship with ease, solid in our faith like  a rock.

Of course life’s not like that.  As much as we may grow in our faith during good times, it never quite fully prepares us for the hard times.  No matter how strongly we believed before, doubt creeps in during those dark nights of the soul, as St. John of the Cross referred to them.  But of course that’s why faith is so hard sometimes.  It takes work to find God in the darkness; to force yourself to turn to Him in prayer when you don’t want to; to have faith when life’s experiences are screaming at us that God is either a fairytale or imaginably cruel.

Though we may not like it, tough times test our mettle (there’s a reason faith is a virtue!). They provide the most opportunity for us to grow in our relationship with God and they also provide opportunity for us to demonstrate our faith to others.  Your friends may not think much of you going to Church every week (or more often, for our Catholic friends out there), but they’ll notice the amazing calm you have before your wife’s surgery, or the hope and strength you display through the pain of your mother’s funeral.

And while knowing all this certainly doesn’t make me ask for these dark nights of the soul to come upon me, it does give me great solace when they do.