Be Encouraged

You Don’t Need a Bigger Stage to Make a Bigger Difference

Not long after my brother got married, he discovered something about his wife and about marriage that many of us take years to understand, if we ever do.

When she was having a tough day, one of those days where nothing went right and everything felt heavier than it should, he started doing something simple. He’d stop at 7-Eleven on the way home and buy her a cherry Slurpee (her favorite) for about a buck ninety-nine. Maybe a little more with tax.

It became a young husband’s go-to for expressing love and support to his wife. Not a vacation. Not jewelry. Not an apology dinner at a nice restaurant to make up for whatever went wrong. A cherry Slurpee.

Not because the Slurpee solved anything. Because she knew what it meant when it showed up. On a day she felt unseen, he walked through the door with proof that he’d been paying attention. A small action. A real difference.

The small thing is rarely as small as it looks.

Here’s where I think we can get it wrong. In culture, and sometimes in ministry, we’ve decided the only way to matter is to GO BIG. Bigger platform. Bigger budget. Bigger title. Bigger stage. Bigger reach. Someone feels a call toward serving and immediately translates it into “I need to get my passport and go serve people in that country…way over there…” That’s a real and good calling for some people. But I wonder how many of us use the size of the ask as an excuse to do nothing, because the version we imagined was too big to start this week.

What if the calling isn’t toward another country at all? What if the “big” move, the one with impact, was “way over there…” in your elderly next-door neighbor’s lawn that she hasn’t been able to get mowed? What if you’ve been too busy waiting for a bigger assignment to notice the one already in front of you?

The small thing is rarely as small as it looks.

I get to watch this play out close up. My wife volunteers with a program called Hearts for Seniors, run by an organization named Hearts With A Mission. It’s worth noting, I serve on their board. I believe in what they’re doing enough to want to be involved where and how I can.

The program pairs volunteers with seniors in our community who are socially isolated, often without family nearby. Some weeks, what my wife does looks like helping her senior with meal prep. Other weeks, it’s a ride to a doctor’s appointment, or picking up a grocery order, or just sitting at her kitchen table and listening while she works through whatever’s been weighing on her. No passport required. No flight booked. The whole mission fits inside a Thursday afternoon, a few miles from home.

That’s not a small thing. Even when it looks like one.

I’ve been turning this “Buck Ninety-Nine” idea over for a long time, long before I heard anyone else put words to it. Then recently I came across an episode of the Ryan Leak Podcast about a 17th-century monastery cook named Brother Lawrence — the kind of guy history would have forgotten if his conversations hadn’t been written down after he died.

Brother Lawrence didn’t discover what he discovered in a cathedral. He found it in a kitchen, washing dishes and scrubbing pots in a Parisian monastery. He never preached a sermon. Never wrote a book. Never built a platform. He reportedly asked that his letters not even be shared. Other people wrote down what he said after he died, preserved his letters against his wishes, and those words have been circulating for 400 years.

His idea was almost offensively simple: you don’t need a sacred space to experience something sacred. He said he felt as close to God peeling potatoes as he did taking communion. The small, invisible, ordinary moment wasn’t a lesser version of the real thing. It was the real thing.

“We ought not to be weary of doing little things for the love of God, who regards not the greatness of the work, but the love with which it is performed.”  — Brother Lawrence

Will Guidara makes a version of the same point in Unreasonable Hospitality. He frames it as good service running both directions. It elevates the person receiving it, but it elevates the person giving it just as much, the moment you stop treating the act as small.

The biggest moments in most of our lives often don’t look big at all. They look like a Slurpee. A grocery run for someone who can’t make it to the store herself. A lawn that got mowed without being asked. A name that popped into your head on the drive home, attached to someone you should probably call.

The weight doesn’t come from the size of the act. It comes from the awareness you bring to it.

The small thing is rarely as small as it looks.

We keep waiting for the big door to open before we’ll act. Meanwhile, the seemingly small door has been open the whole time, and it’s the one that actually leads somewhere more significant than you imagined.

Your Turn

Who’s having a hard week right now, and what’s their version of a cherry Slurpee?

What’s the bigger assignment you’ve been waiting on, when the actual ask might be a lawn next door, or an hour this month with someone who hasn’t had a real conversation in days?

You don’t need a bigger platform. You need to notice the Buck Ninety-Nine moment in front of you, and actually take it.

The small thing is rarely as small as it looks.

Be Encouraged.

If you want to know more about Hearts for Seniors, you can find them here.

If you’re interested in reading more about Brother Lawrence, The Practice of the Presence of God — a collection of his letters and recorded conversations — is available here through my affiliate link.