Little Things - Saturday December 05, 2015
For who has despised the day of small things? Zechariah 4:10
On our Good News Club timeline there is a small picture placed about 33 years before the large red cross. A small baby lies in a manger filled with bright yellow straw. The caption reads "The Savior Has Come."
This reminds me of a Wall Street Journal article called "The Gift of Living with the Not Gifted," from April 4-5, 2015, the weekend edition. I've saved it for its extraordinary story. The subject is the work of an 86-year-old man named Jean Vanier who received this year's Templeton Prize of $1.7 million. The prize honors people who make "exceptional contributions to affirming life's breadth of spiritual dimensions." In 1964 near Paris Vanier started the first L'Arche (the Ark) community, a home that he purchased to live in with two disabled men. The conditions for these men in institutions at the time were violent and abusive. Two years earlier Vanier had finished a doctorate in Aristotelian ethics at the Catholic Institute in Paris. But his faith and compassion led him to regard these men as ones who had something to contribute, ones who "care about the relationship." Now there are 147 such communities on five continents, where thousands of assistants come to live together with disabled men and women.
What about those who can't take years off to serve in this way? Mr. Vanier suggests, "Try and find somebody who is lonely... Go and visit a little old lady who has no friends or family. Bring her flowers. People say 'but that's nothing.' It is nothing-but it's also everything. It always begins with small little things. It all began in Bethlehem. That was pretty small." Amen.
Submitted by:
Dotty Vanderhorst
Cornerstone Community Church
Overland Park, Kansas
One-Year Reading Plan:
Hosea 1:1-3:5
1 John 5:1-21
Psalms 124:1-8
Proverbs 29:5-8
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