Doing Small Things with Great Love (or Holy Moments)
As we reflected in our last post, doing the impossible may indeed require that we forget about the impossibility of the task facing us, and focus on the smallest next step right in front of us. Doing small things with great love is the way to achieve the impossible. To illustrate this, I offer one story, one saint, and one book.
I am reminded of the starfish story, which I am sure many of you have heard but bears repeating. A man is walking along a beach littered with innumerable starfish that have been washed ashore. He notices a small boy picking up the starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. The man smirks and chastises the boy, “Don’t you know that all those starfish are just going to get washed back ashore?” The boy continues to patiently pick up the starfish, one by one, and throw them back into the water. Exasperated, the man pleads “Look, my boy, what you’re doing doesn’t make any difference!” The boy picks up another starfish and looks at it carefully, finally responding to the man as he throws the starfish back in the water, “It makes a difference to this one.”
There may not be a better real life example of the ideal of doing small things with great love to achieve the seemingly impossible than Mother Teresa. Talk about doing the impossible! A middle-aged nun teaching school children in a foreign country receives a spiritual calling to help the poorest of the poor. She moves to the slums of Calcutta and ministers to the gravely ill and dying, with no training, no formal financial backing, and no 10-year plan. One by one, she helps those in need. Others join to assist, and one by one, person by person, an international organization springs into existence. A lifetime later, after triumphs and setbacks, honors and attacks, she and her colleagues continued to their work, focusing on the person right in front of them, one by one. Mother Teresa left us with many reminders of her approach to “do small things with great love” or alternatively to “do ordinary things with extraordinary love.” She said, “I do not agree with the big way of doing things. To us, what matters is an individual.” And "If you can't feed a hundred people, then feed just one." And wryly, "Jesus said love one another. He didn't say love the whole world."
If any of this resonates with you, might I suggest a really wonderful book that I recently read called “Holy Moments” by best-selling author/speaker Matthew Kelly. This short easy book elaborates this concept and applies it to our everyday lives. Holy Moments are those small things that you can do throughout the day to bring kindness, joy, or love into someone’s life. Holy Moments can occur anywhere, anytime, and with anyone (known or unknown). Things like letting someone ahead of you in the checkout line at the supermarket, or allowing a car pull in front of you to change lanes in busy traffic. Or leaving a bigger than usual tip for your restaurant server. Or maybe even giving a tip to someone who wasn’t expecting one. Shoveling snow off your neighbors driveway. Holding the elevator door for someone. Smiling and waving at passers-by on the street. Buying lunch for the stranger behind you in the cafeteria line or drive-thru lane. Writing a hand-written thank-you note, or condolence card, or thinking-of-you message. The possibilities are infinite. We just need to have the peace of mind to remember to do them. With practice and increased awareness to recognize opportunities for these moments, we can fill the world with little gestures of love that have unending ripples. As Mother Teresa said, "Kind words can be short and easy to speak, but their echoes are truly endless."
We have to remember that in a complex overwhelming world, where sometimes so much seems to be going so wrong, that we individuals CAN make an impact. We make the effort to do even the littlest of things with love, and God takes care of the rest. If we don’t make these Holy Moments, who will? Imagine if everyone made Holy Moments a part of their daily mindset and practice. Revisiting the starfish story, Mother Teresa reminds us as well that "We ourselves feel that what we are doing is just a drop in the ocean. But the ocean would be less because of that missing drop."
