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Small things can be significant
Theresa Seraphim g
Spotlight
After hearing a mountain pine beetle update from SRD staff this week, I couldn’t help but muse on the situation.
Here’s a creature no bigger than a grain of rice, which in vast numbers has destroyed many hectares of pine trees and cost SRD much money, and much staff time, in fighting it.
I was also thinking about Silent Night. According to legend, that carol was written when the church organ wouldn’t work because mice had chewed through the bellows, necessitating Fr. Joseph Mohr taking his guitar and writing a hymn for a Christmas midnight mass.
Whether or not that is how the carol came to be, it’s not hard to imagine a mouse behaving in such a way.
If two tinier creatures such as the mountain pine beetle and the mouse can thus effect such change, the lesson is obvious: One does not have to be “big” in order to do things that can change the course of people’s lives..
I suspect in our society, greatness is associated with celebrity, or with doing noted things. If you ask any ten people on the street to give an example of a great person, names such as Tom Cruise or Mother Teresa might be mentioned.
So if I’m not known around the world, I’m not great?
Swell – then most of us aren’t.
But big isn’t necessarily better. It’s easy to have a prestigious position and do nothing, or to be “lowly” and be the one people turn to.
I read a story awhile ago which had a deep impact on me. It was about a man, in his late teens, with a developmental disability who worked as a bagger at a grocery store. He would slip notes of encouragement into customers’ bags as he packed them, and he quickly became the favourite bagger.
Indeed, one evening when there was a long lineup of customers at this man’s till, the manager opened other checkouts, to no avail – the customers would go to no other line but his.
This young man wasn’t the head honcho at the store – but he was the person most remembered –because he had done something positive for them.
He exemplified what Napoleon Hill meant when he said, “If you cannot do great things, do small things in a great way.”
Small things often lead to bigger and, even if they don’t, they still are vital for our world.
Overlooking them is a mistake, for no task is unimportant. More vitally, nobody doing such a task is unimportant.
Just ask the mouse and the mountain pine beetle.
I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble. -Helen Keller
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