Are the little things really enough?

Recently I participated in a church book study reading Brian McLaren’s “The Secret Message of Jesus.”  Like good presbyterians we wondered with each other about what we can really do to change the world.  Can the extreme-ness that McLaren talks about really make a difference?  Is it realistic for any contemporary person to live that way; radically different than others around us?

 

Good questions, right?  We by group process talked about doing the little things daily to make a difference in the world.  But come on, really, does that do it?  I can understand feeling helpless about all the wrongness in the world, I often feel the weight of it.   The justification for only moderate goodness is that there are only so many Ghandis and Martin Luther Kings.  There are people who have lived and died giving us great inspiration that people can be better to each other.  But we think and say to ourselves that we can’t possibly do what they did (and that we don’t want to die like they did).

 

I think and feel that this is a self-fulfilling prophecy.  No one will see real change or be an effective advocate for anyone unless they are convicted that what they do and say is right and necessary.  Also that if they dont act then no one will.

 

Doing the little things like wishing the bus driver a good day have an impact.  A momentary and fleeting impact that may be important to that person in that moment but probably not much more.  In the same way that putting out negative energy has an impact in the opposite direction.  If anything, the two cancel each other out and the general trend in society continues to be the perpetuation of the lowest common denominator.  The basest trend of humanity to care for themselves more than others wins out and continues to screw us slowing into oblivion.

 

We have to do better.  I will do better if I can at all help it.

~ by ajdele on February 12, 2008.