Reflection This Week
TO TRY WITH LOVE

   We live in a world where winners are honored and losers are both left to cry in their soup and are quickly forgotten. Unless it was our favorite team or we ourselves who came in second, very few remember the loser in any contest, whatever the contest. That does not mean that the pain of losing does not hurt. It does. If it did not, we would not try so hard to win. Yet, even for winners, winning is not all it’s cracked up to be. The emotional high lasts only so long and the memory of people who may have reveled in our victory often lasts even less.

   There will always be winners and there will always be losers, however we define winning and losing. Losers can be the real winners because they gave it their very best. They tried to win with everything that was in them. Winners, on the other hand, can be losers because, while they may have won the game, they really did not give it their best. They “mailed in” the victory.

   As Mother Teresa once observed, “God doesn’t ask us to win. He asks us to try.” All of us find ourselves in situations where we know the outcome will not be successful. We cannot succeed, but that must not prevent us from trying, from giving the very best. We are not going to ace every exam, win every race, be the best every time out. We are not God. All we can do and all God asks of us to do and all we should ask, demand, of ourselves is that we try to do our very best every time.

   As a corollary to this, Mother Teresa, perhaps using her own life as an example, reminded her followers and reminds us that “we can do no great things – only small things, with great love.” That is not to say that some things we may do will not be considered great in the eyes of the world. The point is that we do not set out to do the great. We set out to do our very best, to try as best we can in whatever we are doing and to do it with love. Those who love their work always do a better job than those who think of their work as only a job, a paycheck.

   As Matthew 25 reminds us, if we are to see and seek and serve Jesus in every person we meet, we do so in very small ways but we also do so in love. We feed a hungry man, visit a sick woman, clothe a naked child: small actions, seemingly insignificant in the grand scheme of things, but vital to that man, that woman, that child. We cannot solve world hunger or world poverty all at once. Such great deeds are not possible.

   We are not asked to do the impossible. We are asked to try to do what we can do, do the best we can do and do it with love. In a world of where the grand is glorified and the seemingly insignificant is ignored, it is easy to downplay how important it is to do small things. Mother Teresa changed thousands of lives because she tried to do the little things with love.

   It is also just as easy to forget how great small deeds can be and become when they are done in love. They can be life changing, not only for the person we are serving but for ourselves as well.    WJP