Within Our Reach

Oftentimes, we find ourselves feeling inclined to do something great, to go out and change the world. It’s an urging that no amount of time will satisfy, and it feels sometimes as though we will burst for fear of not making a difference. We feel the call to love, because Love lives within us. What’s particularly interesting though, is that there seems to be a trend in the current world generation that we can only change the world if we go out on a missionary trip that we can’t afford right now, or if we go try to be the St. Teresa of Calcutta’s of the world, and so we never do anything at all.

Our world seems to be in a slipping state, and yet I can in all good faith tell you that nothing has changed since the world began. The old saying that history repeats itself seems to be one of the truest, non-God-inspired quotes that man could have thought (although is anything good really not God-inspired?), as our world continually cycles between the good and the bad, the beautiful and the ugly. Plus, we know how the story ends in the final battle (reference Revelation). However, because we feel a panic, the urge to change the bad comes more strongly. We feel so helpless though when we see the price tag of becoming a missionary. We feel endangered when we realize that the slums we want to help have bad crime statistics. So we stay home, pray, and hope that someone else will change our world for us as we cry to God, “Please send someone to make a difference, just not me.”

Maybe I’m just a huge St. Therese of Lisieux fan, or maybe I love that St. Teresa of Calcutta knew what love meant, but it seems to me that sometimes we take these people’s words wrong. We assume that to change the world, we have to do something huge. Is not St. Teresa famous for having said “We can do no great things, only small things with great love”? Ironically, she also said that changing the world meant starting with the family, encompassing far more than blood relationships in the day to day life.

Despite our constant understanding of the world in need to be the third world countries across the sea, in reality, changing the world is a whole lot simpler than that. God does call some people to rise up and become the next great name in the news making a difference, but He also asks us to have just as big a heart in our daily dealings with the world. We are all called to sainthood, even if our name is never officially canonized. Really, we can start our change for the world with those closest to us in the elderly who have no one left, the friend who needs an ear, the person on the street asking for a meal, the single mother who is frightened at what might happen to her child.

Even those are far more imaginable needs than the relationships we take for granted. Truly the world that needs changing starts with those: we have the sister who needs her brother’s reassurance, the brother who yearns to be told that we were at the game watching his last play; we have a mother who wants to know that her children still think about her, and the father who wants to see that what he did was important to his family; we have a wife that craves to see that she’s still beautiful to her husband even when she’s getting older, and a husband who desires for his wife to hold him up when he can’t be strong anymore; we have the grandparents who don’t want to be forgotten in their old age, to know that they are still cool to their grandchildren.

If ever our eyes would see the basic principle in the command from Christ to love one another, the need for greatness would be satiated. Greatness lies in the self-sacrifice, even unto our family. God created the husband/wife covenant first (in the covenant with Adam and Eve), then the family covenant (in the covenant with Noah), and so on until he created the final covenant with His Church (In the Eucharist). Our first call to greatness is through those closest to us. We can’t ignore the world that surrounds us to chase the bigger world beyond us. We have to start within our reach.