What can I do to make any difference that I have lived thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety years on Planet Earth?
“All you can do is face the world with quiet grace and hope you make a sliver of difference.”
Brian Doyle wrote those words in the Sojourners magazine regarding raising your children, maintaining a happy marriage, and doing your job well.
Doyle wrote the reflective article for the January 2016 issue, the time of year we associate with looking forward and simultaneously looking backward, after the fashion of the two-faced Roman god Janus.
To hope for the future, you must believe “being a very good you matters somehow,” the editor of Portland Magazine at the University of Portland in Oregon wrote.
Another urgent belief, according to Doyle, is “that trying to be an honest and tender parent” will have reverberations among your descendants for centuries to come.
Still another point in Doyle’s credo is that people beyond your range of knowledge will benefit as you do “your chosen work with creativity and diligence.”
Through all your good work, however, you likely will never get proper credit or be properly understood, except by Jesus, whom Doyle calls “the Arab Jew.” He realized good had gone out of Him the instant a sick woman dared to touch the hem of His garment. Few of us have such perception.
Doyle says realizing our limits should bring humility, knowing “we are all broken and small and brief.” But, while acknowledging our limits, we need also to know, where there is love, “there is everything else.”
Salenthiel C. Kirk, summed up this message in his 1912 song, “Our Best”:
Wait not for men to laud, heed not their slight;
Winning the smile of God brings its delight!
Aiding the good and true ne’er goes unblest,
All that we think or do, be it the best.
Every work for Jesus will be blest,
But He asks from everyone his best.
Our talents may be few, these may be small,
But unto Him is due our best, our all.
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