3-9-22 THE POWER OF NOTHING

Cal spilled something on his sweatshirt.

“Wear your coat to school instead,” his mom said, but Cal is in a spot right now where everything is magnified, and his coat is too stiff, and the stiff coat triggers some reactions we have been working to overcome. So his mom went to work, because she cannot lose her job, and I drove to her house and gently walked my 10-year-old grandson through the process of agreeing to get in the car and go to the store, buy a sweatshirt, then go to school. That’s a lot of steps to potentially trip on, but we made it through all of them and he is currently in school wearing a new sweatshirt.

There are a lot of aspects of this last couple hours that are beautiful: 

My holy angel nudged me to text my daughter in the wee hours of the morning to see if she needed help because this beautiful little family is living in crisis right now. 

She called me and said, yes, they could use help. 

Cal allowed his brain to be flexible and not fixate. 

Ross Dress for Less opened at 9 am, unlike every other store in the area. 

I had gas in my car, and a car that works. 

I am not working (at any kind of job that gives me a paycheck) and I have a flexible schedule, so I am available to help.

I could go on and on about how many good things I am aware of this morning, and being conscious of them makes me feel the uplifting emotion of gratitude.

After I dropped Calvin at school I texted his mom to tell her he was safely in class. She texted back her thanks, then asked how much the sweatshirt cost so she could Venmo the money to me. I replied, (thankful that I could afford such a reply), “Nothing.”

And I got thinking about the power of Nothing.

Of course, it’s a code word.  “Nothing” is code for, “This is the price of love” or “This is what I do because I respect you, or I have compassion for you, or I feel compelled to help you.”

In Spanish “de nada”, meaning “of nothing”, has evolved into the familiar way of saying you’re welcome. 

If we look closely, we are likely to see our days are chock full of nothings: kindnesses done for us or by us. I think of them as little sparks that twinkle in the universe of our lives, adding more light and positive energy. Acts of goodness, whether they feel kind or not, that enrich the world as a whole and uplift lives one at a time: Bending down to tie someone’s shoe, merging gently on the off ramp, thanking the frustrated clerk at the drive-thu. Opening a door. Unloading the dishwasher, especially without being asked. Returning your shopping cart. Tipping an extra 5%. Offering a little encouragement, either to someone else or yourself. 

I suspect the way we feel about ourselves is dramatically influenced by the nothings we perform. And, I have learned from experience, the giving of nothing is much more powerful than the receiving. 

Next time you perform a little kindness, whisper the word NOTHING to yourself. Those little nothings add up.

I imagine our Lord, whose grace and mercy still makes me quiver, I imagine him exhausted, bloodied, covered in sweat and stained with tears, flesh torn and muscles stretched and his brain hurting from all he was asked to process those last hours in his human form. I imagine him sitting up, folding the shroud that had been placed over his lifeless form, placing it on the stone, moving upward to his foreordained place, then pausing, looking back, and whispering;

“It was nothing.”

That’s the price of love.

"It was nothing"
(It was everything)