Yesterday, I bumped across a couple of brief writings from some great souls that were essentially saying the same thing.   Basically, don’t worry too much about the big picture, but rather love the people who are actually around you with great love, and do the things that are yours to do with great love.  In this is greatness (not to speak of contentment!), and enables God to do something with us as opposed to us being paralyzed by what we cannot do.   The first one is particularly  meaningful to me personally as I sit in a city of 24 million people in a country of 1.2 billion people.

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“So many terrible things happen every day that we start wondering whether the few things we do ourselves make any sense.  When people are starving only a few thousand miles away, when wars are raging close to our borders, when countless people in our own cities have no homes to live in, our own activities look futile. Such considerations, however, can paralyse us and depress us.   Here the word call becomes important.  We are not called to save the world, solve all problems, and help all people.  But we each have our own unique call, in our families, in our work, in our world.  We have to keep asking God to help us see clearly what our call is and to give us the strength to live out that call with trust.  Then we will discover that our faithfulness to a small task is the most healing response to the illnesses of our time.”   Henri Nouwen

“I am struck by some people who want to enter community. Their energies are so taken up by this objective that they are unable to hear the cry of the poor and to see those near them who need their attention, their love and their presence. Their desire to enter community seems to blind them. The best way for them to prepare for community life is to love and be present to those near them. Then the passage to life in community will come quite naturally.”Jean Vanier 

“We can do no great things, only small things with great love.”  Mother Teresa