Small things with great love

In my desire to change the world, I often look for the strategic leverage points, the fulcrum that will bring maximum change, that will have largest-scale impact. This has driven me to reach for the top as high as I can as fast as I can, believing that’s where I can have the largest impact. So somehow at a very young age I found myself at the United Nations, the Ministry of Education, the government policy-making level, the New York’s and Delhi’s of this world - the centres of power, where I believed I could have the most strategic impact for change.

Yet is this where real change lies? Where are the true agents of change to be found?

More and more I am realizing the constraints of being ‘at the top’ – how tied your hands are, how many people you have to please just to be able to keep that position at the top, how careful you have to be and how much you cannot say, how much bureaucracy and ceremony and insincere speeches and self-absorption exists here, how resistant the system is to change at this level.

Can change really be imposed from the top down?

Jesus never went near the centre of power, never seized control of the top. His whole life was devoted to a forgotten nether-region on the margins of civilization; his greatest efforts invested into a tiny group of twelve unknown, uneducated fishermen. And somehow, through this small insignificant work, he was able to bubble up a silent revolution that transformed the entire world.

We get so tempted by numbers and scale, but perhaps it is out of the grassroots that change must bubble up – out of someone being willing to get their hands dirty in working out the mundane details, to truly live out and embody an ideal, to pour themselves into doing something small but doing it well – so that it can truly become something new and different that the world hasn’t seen before, not just an idea floating around but something that has taken visible root, something that refreshingly reveals truth that is incarnated – something which is hard to come by in this world.

I wonder if in my eagerness to get to the top, I rushed so fast that I ended up getting here with all these ideals and theories, but little concrete proof and living examples to show for it.

And it is through such living examples that the world can see and touch the tangible possibility of change, can be inspired and empowered by the potential of its realization.

And this revolution can only begin at the grassroots, when someone is willing to devote their efforts not to making a big show, but to ‘doing small things with great love’.