'Small things with great love'

By Mia Pohlman

I've spent some time being angry and bitter about loss, angry and bitter that I don't have what I want. I've wanted new places and grandeur and instead have found myself in the familiar and often unglamorous.

I've found anger and bitterness distract from gratitude, which brings joy and freedom.

It's time to lay down sorrow for joy. Rejoice. "For freedom, Christ set us free."

Once, I heard a speaker say places of sin in our lives are gifts from God, places where God wants us to know him better.

I think the same is true of unpleasant and potentially harmful emotions such as anger and bitterness.

My anger and bitterness can become my gifts to God, places I ask him to come into completely, to have, to transform.

I don't have to deny these emotions; I can give them away to my God who loves me. They are his to do with as he pleases, which always means drawing me more deeply into him and his love.

Once I had the privilege of sitting in on a small group comprised of men who didn't have homes. One man said, "I used to be an angry person."

The conviction, freedom and joy with which he said that sentence made an impression on me; this is the freedom Christ gives, the kind of freedom that makes me hunger to know God in that way, too.

I am not yet what I want to be, and that is OK. I think this process of transformation takes time, that we must have patience, faith in God and grace for ourselves.

Phillip Phillips says it like this: "All I can do is be the man that the Lord brought me to today."

I have faith in God and I have faith in time, giving us and making us into what we need. Father Bill always said every day we are not the same person we were the day before. We are new.

The other day, I came across Deuteronomy 1:31: "You saw how the Lord, your God, carried you, as a man carries his child, all along your journey until you arrived at this place."

"This place." Here. Now. It has purpose, too.

As God has been with me in all the places before, he has carried me into this one. This is an arrival; live into it.

So many times, it seems like big gestures get the attention, that extraordinary proofs of faith are what we should be striving for.

Maybe this is true at some points in our lives.

I think what shouldn't be discounted, though, is the place we are standing in right now -- literally, in the moment you are reading this sentence, how can you love someone right where you are? -- and all of the "little" ways we are being asked to love in our "normal" day-to-day.

One of Mother Teresa's mottos was "small things with great love." I like that. Small, unrecognized sacrifices -- it is a hard road to holiness.

Maybe what needs to be changed is how we think of "extraordinary."

At the restaurant where I work, I heard one co-worker ask another co-worker what was new. He answered, "Everything."