How Important Are You?

You don’t have to be important to be important.

As strange as that sounds, you can see the truth of it throughout the stories of the church. Take the famous passage from Ecclesiasticus 44:

Let us now praise famous people, our ancestors in their generations. The Lord gave them great glory, his majesty from the beginning….Of others there is no memory; they died as though they had never been born; and their children after them. But these also were godly people, whose good deeds have not been forgotten.

This kind of invisibility has, paradoxically, brought sainthood to some. The life’s work of St. Monica was, as the Catholic Encyclopedia puts it, “to have literally wrestled with God for the soul of her son”—St. Augustine. While St. Willibrord, whom we celebrated November 7, helped convert the people of the Netherlands, he also paved the way for the tireless and more widespread evangelism of St. Boniface.

Clearly, for some people, a large part of the mission is simply to prepare the way for the full flowering of God’s action in a particular time and place. The contributions of others, however, are even more obscure—like yours and mine.

Which makes the words of Ecclesiasticus so profoundly comforting. Most of us are part of the teeming masses whose lives will not appear in any history book. And yet that should not stop us from living faithfully—for those faithful actions, however small they seem, might just resound through the ages.