These feel like frightening times. The world at large keeps crashing into my small frame of reference.

It doesn’t feel as though I can do anything against the hatred, fear, and violence that keeps cropping up all around us.

Part of my helpless feeling comes from my own world currently being very small.

My days revolve around nursing babies, napping toddlers, and newly-become elementary students.

What I have to give, what I have to offer to stem this dark tide is small.

Our season in life leaves little room for discretionary income and time.

I wonder if anything I do makes much difference.

In this season of Advent, this season of preparing ourselves for the biggest Gift of all, the gifts that I bring to our God, to our world, seem insignificant, tiny.

Leaving my own book to read one more story aloud? Trifling.

Baking cookies to give to our neighbors? Inconsequential.

Giving up a meal out to purchase toys for a toy drive? Insufficient.

Yet as I read still another version of the Christmas Story to my girls I am reminded that an act does not have to be big to be sacred.

Small acts of kindness to those I know, small smiles and gentle words in passing to those who seem different from us, small gifts to strangers are all as sacred and beautiful as the act of preaching to thousands.

You don’t have to have endless resources to be able to change the world.  You don’t have to accomplish something enormous to let a glimpse of light in to the darkness.

After all, what is Advent but the remembrance that it was the smallest, most fragile gift of all that was sacred enough to change our world forever.