Thinking Big
By Paul J. Ashton, Psy.D., D.Min.
Consultant to the VIRTUS® Programs
Consultant to the VIRTUS® Programs
But you, Bethlehem too small to be among the clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel; Whose origin is from of old, from ancient times. He shall stand firm and shepherd his flock by the strength of the Lord, in the majestic name of the Lord, his God; and they shall remain, for now his greatness shall reach to the ends of the earth; he shall be peace. — Micah 5:1, 3- 4
Unsung heroes… We hear their stories in our local papers occasionally. We receive countless emails detailing their heroic efforts, encouraging us to forward their story on to our 20 closest friends, and if we are among the fortunate, we may even become the beneficiaries of their bravery. Most or the time however, we fail to see those giants walking among us performing great and wondrous deeds effortlessly and without worry of cost to self. We miss them largely because we don’t know all of the good they do. We look for big, but sometimes we see them as small.
These heroes think big, yet often operate from the mindset of that they are small, and believe that the things they do are small. The whole idea of genuine power and greatness is something people see as characteristics beyond themselves—blessings and gifts that others have and that they lack. Many of us fall into the trap of thinking that our efforts don’t really matter and the work we do is insignificant. We look for big, we want big, we pray for big, and we even gamble to win big, but our thoughts and the prerecorded messages that we play in our heads say “small.”
However, we only remain small when we believe others who take our voices and speak for us, who criticize the things we enjoy and love, and negate the good work that we do for others and ourselves. Ironically, those who do this to us are the small ones trying to act big—and we tend to buy the act.
Sometimes we get discouraged from the influences of the media and the heartbreaking, scary stories that we listen to and read about. For every one gentle, poignant, heart-warming movie playing at the cinema, there seem to be 10 others filled with violence, greed, and evil. If there is a heroic message in the story it all too often seems beyond our reach.
Thinking big is a way of life. We see ourselves as persons empowered with enough strength to change any situation from bad to good. It is the awareness that knowledge is power, and that this kind of power can change the world. It is also the acceptance that what we do really matters. It is the absolute belief in ourselves that we are God’s perfect creation. We are big because we are created and loved by God. We are not big because of our deeds.
So many of the Saints (those named by the Church and those saints unnamed) gone before us have taught us and shown us how to live big. We have many examples and many choices, but the one clearest example, the one that is outstandingly perfect as a model, is the life of Jesus. From His birth through His death and resurrection and everything in between, Jesus has given us the model to live by, and by His great works the example to encourage us when we begin to believe we are too small. He shows how to start living big again.
From Bethlehem, a very small place between other big places, to Calvary—another small place—we see the magnitude of what big really is and what it can do. We see what can happen when we accept our own power and transform it from small to big.
We can change everything by accepting how big we are and by seeing how this power can help all those who have not yet accepted their bigness, or who are unable because of their age or life challenges. It is a matter of embracing every small act and choice we are faced with as one whose consequences are always big.
Pope Benedict reminded us recently that our strength comes from “….the stupendous reality that God knows us and is near, that his grandeur and strength do not follow the logic of the world, but the logic of a defenseless baby whose only strength is the love he entrusts to us."[1]
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