Small tiles

Every small act of good we do carry an impact far greater than we can imagine. I believe in the presence of the Divine in our life. Our small good acts are used in another person’s life to counter their negative experiences. Sometimes small acts are catalysts of a major transformation. The Divine does not cause bad things to happen to us but He uses the good of this world to allow us to feel his presence.

When our time on earth comes to an end, our life is completed. When we sit in heaven and look back on life we will see the many good acts of others, often smallish, used by the Divine to intervene in our life to redress the bad and put us back on the path of our salvation. We will see how our own good acts have been used to affect others often to a magnitude beyond the expectations of our humble offering.

Our lives are intertwined. Whatever we do will impact not only the people around us but is far reaching even to people we are not acquainted with. Our lives are like a large orchestra, each playing a small note seemingly unimportant but together make the music great. We are also like small tiles, some plain some designed, all indivually different in what we can offer. When the world comes to an end there will be an enormous beautiful mosaic intricately made up of us small tiles depicting how we were interwoven into each other’s lives.

The small boy in today’s gospel wasn’t really thinking too much about the whole big picture. We too should not be self-conscious especially into thinking what we can only offer is too little, too small. Or worse, we must not live in fear of losing everything when we start to do good by giving.

A key diver who helped in the rescue at Tham Luang magnanimously said the divers are no heroes but are merely people with a different skill set and are humbled and happy to give something back to the community. They offered what they had in their basket, their own 5 barley loaves and 2 fishes. I keep mentioning Tham Luang because there is so much to learn. There is so much to see and meditate on if we look deeper at the completed picture of that whole story.

The cleaners and cooks, the drivers and the washer women, and many more came like ‘small boys’ never imagining the eventual big picture but only humbly offering selflessly what they have. The end result, can we say, is like the multiplication of the 5 loaves and 2 fishes that fed a love story to the entire watching world? Can we claim this love story to be scripted by the Divine who took each person’s humble offering, blessed and shared it for the whole world to be satisfied of a hunger for a way to live?

We live side by side like small tiles in a mosaic. “Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness gentleness and patience” (second reading). We cannot fit into the mosaic of life when we do not love the other, when we are selfish and not selfless. We must smoothen our edges with gentleness by doing good to one another, and be patient for the eventual outcome of life. We must act with the innocent mind of that small boy.

We must also be like the people in the crowd eager and expectant, listening and searching, wanting to believe that the Divine is present in our every day life, patiently knowing that we are all part of his big picture.

We are merely small tiles but looked after and polished by the master artist. We fit perfectly into the beautiful mosaic of life eternal when we trustingly give away our very own 5 loaves and 2 fishes.