The Importance Of Little Things

Bad news, campers. The mouse died...and just four days after my daughter carried it into our home.

Unfortunately, she was also the one to discover its passing. She had spent the night with a friend -- it was the first time in three days (and nights) that she had stopped caring for it personally. In her absence, my wife took over the mouse baby chores. We spent time online, we spoke with experts, we did everything we could. And the little guy really was making progress. Or, at least, he appeared to be.

Well, my wife and I layed down for a nice (and rare) weekend nap. While we were sleeping, my daughter came home, checked on her mouse and found him dead. It had to have just happened and the pain of it crushed her heart. She began sobbing. My wife joined in. My older son took it like a stoic (though he told me later he cried). And I got to be the guy. While they were dealing with the tough emotional stuff, my Dad duty involved taking the mouse into the other room, wrapping it in one of my son's orphaned socks, and then quietly burying it in the backyard. My kids said they didn't want a funeral. They just wanted the pain to go away.

So how do you explain to a child why God enables us to care for such tiny, innocent creatures only to have them die?

Weirdly, I thought of Mother Theresa. Honestly, I did.

In the worst slums of Calcutta, the poor, sick and shunned are abandoned to die in great heaping piles of garbage. They are human detritus, les misérables, if you will. And they live and exist under the societal radars of most or our world's great cities.

In Calcutta, though, one tiny Albanian woman abandoned everything she knew to live among and serve those wretched people. And she did so for fifty or more years. Agnes (her birth name) believed her greatest calling was simply to help such people -- persons she considered more important than herself in the eyes of God -- to find peace in their final days. She assisted them in leaving their lives with the dignity they deserve as God's children, regardless of faith, skin color or class.

Pope John Paul II had this to say about Agnes:

"She served all human beings by promoting their dignity and respect, and made those who had been defeated by life feel the tenderness of God.''

In its last days on Earth, our mouse found an Agnes in my little girl. She fed it. She made it warm. And she loved it. And when it finally passed -- much later, I imagine, than it would have without my daughter's intervention -- the mouse died with food in its belly and a warm home over its head.

That's the Jesus stuff Agnes lived out loud. And while I wish like crazy my kids wouldn't have to hurt like they did, I can't help but be proud that they're already putting their hearts out there on the edge, right where they most count. In fact, I wonder why I'm not doing more of the same. The Kingdom of God is more than mice, after all.

I guess all good things have to start somewhere.

"Little things are indeed little," said Agnes. "But to be faithful in little things is a great thing. (God) will use you to accomplish great things on the condition that you believe much more in His love than in your own weakness."

Amen to you Agnes. The world misses you. And Godspeed to you little mouse. May your life have mattered. And may our lives matter more for having touched yours.