Do Small Things with Great Love
We can all do something small and loving today, even it we have to fake it a little.
“Not all of us can do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”
This quote is attributed to Mother Teresa.
As we together devote ourselves to discovering our unique calling and living a great adventure, we can fall into a common fallacy of belief.
It’s so easy to assume that our call to adventure will result in wide notoriety for ourselves.
It’s easy to think, particularly in the dopamine-addicted world we all live in, that we will one day be “rewarded” for leaning into our call to adventure by becoming someone “great.”
Early in our lives, it’s hard for us to define “greatness” as anything other than becoming powerful, famous, influential, wealthy and/or widely celebrated.
But following your call and saying yes to your next adventure is no guarantee of this kind of greatness.
I would go so far as to say this…
If this kind of greatness is your primary goal, you’ve likely yet to actually discover your unique calling.
But, I don’t mean this as derogatory at all!
We all have a season of life when we must build our ego.
I certainly did.
It’s completely natural and normal.
This sort of self-focused desire for greatness may even be necessary for us to find ourselves in the end.
It is in not measuring up to our own fantasy of who we hoped to become that we begin to make peace with the person who emerged within us along the way.
And in the process, we begin to redefine greatness from the inside-out instead of the outside-in.
We sense our own reframed greatness as we find a new source of power in our own frailty. Humility begins to replace hubris. Over time, impulses toward grace, empathy and forgiveness work to combat our competitive nature. Overconfidence falls victim to hard-earned wisdom. Even our deepest insecurities, once they are exposed, can transform into pathways of love to others.
That’s what it looks like to accept a unique calling.
It’s knowing that you’ll one day be completely satisfied to do small things with great love with no audience in sight.
It’s knowing that all of the power, acclaim and fame that can be acquired is laughably inadequate to one humble heart full of kindness, wisdom and hope.
Not quite there yet?
Yeah, me neither.
Not all the way, anyway.
This is where something that I learned while working with folks going through the 12 Steps of Recovery is helpful.
They like to say:
”Fake it until you make it.”
When my first-half-of-life ego ambushes me, I try to remember that it’s just there to remind me where I came from. It’s always part of me, but it doesn’t own me anymore.
And then I try to do one, small, selfless loving act.
Fake it until you make it…one small act of love at a time.