When you can't give much

Elisha replied to her, “How can I help you? Tell me, what do you have in your house?” “Your servant has nothing there at all,” she said, “except a small jar of olive oil”… 2 Kings 4:2

Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up: “Here is a boy with five small barley loaves and two small fish, but how far will they go among so many?”… John 6:8-9

A poor widow came and put in two very small copper coins, worth only a few pence. Mark 12:42

There are no prizes for spotting the link between these three passages – in each case something so small as to be hardly worth bothering with turns out to be massively important.

The woman in 2 Kings has reached rock bottom. A widow, she is terrified that the person she owes money to is going to take her sons into slavery. But at the suggestion of the prophet Elisha she – with a next-to-nothing supply of oil – starts up a micro-business sufficient to pay off her debts.

The boy in John 6 presumably offers his lunch-time pack-up to Jesus’ disciples to help with a sudden emergency – and five thousand “men” (plus women and children?) get fed.

The widow in Mark 12 can afford to put into the temple treasury only “two very small copper coins”. And what happens? She draws Jesus’ admiration – and becomes an example who has been read about and preached about for two thousand years and counting.

During the present lockdown one of the worst things is feeling so useless. We want to do something to help; we want to make a contribution. We look at the front-line workers who risk their health and possibly even their lives every day just by going to work, and we wish we had more to offer than admiration and encouragement (and the banging of saucepans on Thursday evenings), important though those are.

The danger then is that we slump into an attitude of shoulder-shrugging helplessness: subconsciously we think “Because I can’t do everything, there’s no point trying to do anything”. And that’s where we need the message of these stories: that even tiny, insignificant things can in fact make a real difference.

This is such a truism in all sorts of situations that it has given birth to a cliché: “It’s the little things that count”. Not that big things don’t count too, of course! But that doesn’t affect the truth of the cliché. The thing about truisms is that they have a habit of being, well, true.

In the lockdown situation the obvious example might be a friendly greeting to a stranger if we’re able to go out for a walk; or a smile and a word of thanks to the person sitting at the supermarket check-out or driving the bus or delivering the letters or… well, the possible list is endless.

Not to mention a message of some more permanent kind, via the internet or email or good old-fashioned phone or letter. Little things like that can, as we say, “make somebody’s day”.

I read an article once about the total contribution a footballer might make to a match in terms of time on the ball. I had vaguely assumed that that brilliant mid-field player who bossed the game and orchestrated his team’s victory would dominate whole long sequences of play. But no: apparently it’s just a matter of a few minutes – which, when you think about it, get your calculator out, and divide ninety (the number of minutes in a game) by twenty-two ( the number of players on the pitch) isn’t so surprising after all. My wife and I watched a German league game this afternoon – the first to be played under lockdown and behind closed doors – and Dortmund’s opening goal was a perfect illustration. The goal-scorer met a cross with the side of his foot and guided it into the net – the work, quite literally, of a split second, a statistic that would barely figure in the final stats, but which was a mark of brilliance and which changed the game.

Yes, little things!

Nothing done for the glory of God, and in the name of Jesus, is ever done in vain. So, as one seemingly blank, even slightly boring, day after another stretches before some of us, let’s pray for a positive and determined spirit and grab hold of every opportunity that comes our way. Let’s get the basic fact into our heads: I can make a difference today.

That way, we really can support both those who are working themselves into exhaustion, and, even more, those whose lives are most deeply affected by what is happening.

Lord God, I don’t have much to give at the present time. But such as I have I offer to you. Please take it, sanctify it, multiply it and use it, and to you be all the glory. Amen.