Doing small things with great love (copy)
Sharon Eubank spent nearly 30 years doing humanitarian work around the world, but it all started with socks. Yes, socks. A seemingly inconsequential item changed her perspective about the ways that we can serve others, and she has now shared what she learned in the informative and motivational Christopher Award-winning book “Doing Small Things with Great Love: How Everyday Humanitarians are Changing the World.”
During a “Christopher Closeup” interview, Sharon recalled a moment in the 1990s when she found her mother knitting bright red socks. When she asked her why she was doing that, her mother responded that there was an airlift taking donations to Sarajevo to help the people suffering there during the Yugoslavian War. Sharon thought to herself, “Is that the best we can do? Have women in middle America knitting socks for all the things that those people needed?”
“Then a couple of years later,” Sharon continued, “I read a story in The New York Times about a woman who was in Sarajevo. Her building had been bombed. She was living in the basement, and the pipes had broken so everything was freezing, frozen ice. She said a Red Cross truck pulled up into the yard, and they distributed brand new wool socks. She said she put her filthy feet into those socks and pulled them up, and she felt so grateful for whoever had provided them. Of course, the bigger issues still remained: the war was still going, the bombs were still falling. But for that moment, that woman, that was what she needed. It made a difference…I recognized that rather than just focusing on ‘I can only do the big things; the small things don’t matter,” it’s the right thing that comes at the right time for the right reason that makes humanitarian aid valuable.”
The simplicity of that idea guided Sharon’s humanitarian work and, decades later, led her to write “Doing Small Things with Great Love,” the title of which is derived from Saint Mother Teresa’s famous quote, “We can’t all do great things, but we can all do small things with great love.”
Sharon explained, “The emphasis isn’t on the thing that you’re doing. It’s on the way that you do it…[Mother Teresa] worked with some of the hardest, lowest-caste people in India. As they were dying, she brought them into her place. She washed their feet. She removed the filth of the street. She tucked them into clean sheets. She held their hands while they were dying. And she looked in their eyes and said, ‘You are worthy of this. God loves you. I’m an instrument of His love.’…Even though they were small things, ordinary things, that made all the difference…So I wanted to highlight, you don’t have to worry that what you’re doing is small because if you do it with great compassion, it becomes something divine.”
The dignity of the human person is a recurring theme throughout the book, and Sharon commends faith leaders like Pope Leo, “who talks a lot about the dignity of each person, the respectful treatment, the humane solutions that must be part of how we tackle difficult things…In my experience over 30 years, people don’t change unless they completely feel like you respect them and you love them. Once they feel that, your partnership explodes. And it isn’t the thing that we’re giving them – it’s not the food; it’s not the medical care. It’s that respect that they crave in their difficult situations that we can give the most.”
For free copies of the Christopher News Note Bear One Another’s Burdens, write: The Christophers, 264 West 40th Street, Room 603, New York, NY 10018; or e-mail: mail@christophers.org.
