Friday Night, Small Light

Matthew 18:1-5

Phrases that spoke to me today:
• unless you turn and become like children
• whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven
• whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me

Applying the Word to My Life:
I have watched more than one of my sons go through a football season where they practiced, listened to the coaches, worked to improve, and still spent most of the games standing on the sideline. Other parents have told me they've watched their sons go through the same thing.

That hurts, especially when you're young. You can do what you were asked to do and still not get the opportunity you hoped for. At some point the question becomes bigger than football: why are you doing the work?

If effort is supposed to earn recognition, playing time, or success, disappointment eventually becomes bitterness. But there's another answer. I can do the best I can with the gifts God gave me, keep my commitment, and keep joy in my heart even when the result isn't the one I wanted.

That's humility.

Thérèse of Lisieux spent much of her short life learning the same lesson. She wanted to do enormous things for God. She dreamed of being a missionary, a martyr, an apostle. Instead, she entered a Carmelite convent at fifteen, lived a hidden life of prayer and ordinary work, became sick, and died at twenty-four.

Thérèse eventually stopped measuring her life by the size of the result. She offered God the thing actually in front of her: a difficult person, a small task, an inconvenience, even something as insignificant as picking up a pin. Her Little Way wasn't about doing less. It was about doing what she could with great love and leaving God free to decide what became of it.

That's what Jesus means when He places a child in the middle of the disciples. A child depends. He receives his life, gifts, and opportunities from someone else. We spend much of adulthood trying to forget that we're in exactly the same position before God.

We work hard to engineer the outcome we want, and sometimes we succeed often enough to believe we're in control. But we're not. The harder we cling to that illusion, the harder it becomes to recognize how completely we depend on God.

Sometimes a closed path is also the moment when we finally look around and notice where God is opening another one.

Thérèse couldn't make her life become the life she imagined, so she gave God the life she actually had. Then God did something with it she never planned.

A year after she died, her writings were published as Story of a Soul. The book spread around the world and began forming Christians she'd never meet in places she'd never visit. Eventually she was declared a Doctor of the Church and patroness of missions.

She never became the missionary she imagined. Her life became much larger than the life she had planned.

Humility isn't thinking small. It's giving God everything and letting Him decide how big the fruit becomes.

What God does with our gifts may look nothing like the result we'd have chosen. Our part is to give them faithfully.

My Response for Today:
Today I'll give God my best and ask whether I want His plan more than mine.

ABOUT ST. THÉRÈSE OF LISIEUX
Name: St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Thérèse Martin), "the Little Flower"
Lived: January 2, 1873 – September 30, 1897, Alençon and Lisieux, France
Feast Day: October 1
Patron of: missionaries, florists, pilots, priests
Title: Virgin, Doctor of the Church
Selected Writings: Story of a Soul — her autobiography, where she lays out the "Little Way" this entry draws on
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