I broke my pinky in six places last weekend. Thankfully, it’s on my left hand. Still, it’s amazing to me how one little tiny part of the body can be so painful and can get in the way of opening bottles, rolling down the car window, holding a cell phone, and typing. In time, it will heal and I imagine I will grow to be grateful for the role it plays in my life.
I’ve been thinking recently about away little things affect our lives. I suppose I have St. Paul to thank for the meditation about how one part tends to affect the whole. In a large family, one disagreement among siblings or one child’s irresponsibility can affect all other relationships. At work, one employee’s incompetence or bitterness or passive aggressive behavior can affect the work of everyone. In a parish, the attitude of one leader of one program can poison the ministry of many others. One driver on your journey home can anger you, distract you, or even endanger you.
I suppose it all comes down to what we choose to care about. Perhaps it comes down to what we are willing to overlook, what we are willing to forgive. We can let the one driver ruin the rest of our journey or we can chalk up that driver’s negligence to ineptitude or other mitigating circumstances. I like to make up reasons for why people are stupid. I tell the kids that we should pray for the driver going 90 miles an hour because their mother must be sick and they are racing to get home. Or the person who never uses a signal and never lets you know where they’re headed on the road must be so consumed with thoughts of a sick child they don’t even think about using a directional. It’s an invitation to prayer and it helps me be less angry. It’s harder at work. Sure, everyone has a story and everyone has sick relatives or children or other responsibilities beyond the office, but some behaviors are just unprofessional.
Our town recently held a shredding day and we gathered up all sorts of whole papers to take to the park to be destroyed. I ran across a letter from my father that he wrote to me in high school. In it, he challenged me to be more tolerant of those who are not as smart, not as confident, not as creative as I think I am. It gave us all a good laugh because some things haven’t changed since I was in high school. Needless to say, I kept the letter as a reminder of things I still need to work on more than 30 years later.
I think sometimes we are addicted to outrage. We enjoy being irritated. Everyone on television is angry. Everyone is screaming at each other. The folks on the left hate the people on the right. The people on the right hate the people on the left. In the end, nothing gets done. We could all use a little more tolerance, a little more prayer, and a little less outrage.
We can all make little differences. My pinky taught me that. We can pray for each other. We can forgive one another. We can stop being needlessly concerned with the actions of people we simply cannot control. There will always be people who are dumb. There will always be people who are passive aggressive. There’ll always be people whose attitudes are poisonous because they don’t believe they have anything more to learn in life. But we don’t need to be one of these people. We only control ourselves, our reactions, our thoughts, our prayers.
This week, let us take responsibility for ourselves. Let God sort out the rest. Let us commit to doing our little part to make the world better place.