WE'RE IMPORTANT TO ONE ANOTHER

There are times in the lives of each and every one of us when we begin to feel that we are not all that important in the grand scheme of things. Why we feel that way we sometimes have no idea, but we feel that way anyone. It’s a little discouraging and certainly disconcerting especially when we believe that every person is important and no one is unimportant in God’s eyes and, of course, the only eyes that really count.

The truth is that we fill important places in each other’s lives. Even more, we don’t realize that are doing so when we are doing so. In the same way others fill important places in our lives. Sometimes we are quite aware that that is what we are doing as when we are present through their suffering or filling some needs that the other cannot do so without outside help.

Again, there are times we are simply unaware of how much our presence is important to another even if that presence is only in passing, especially if it is only in passing. A kind word, a friendly smile, a nod of simple recognition can make another person’s day just as a word or a smile or a nod sometimes makes our day. It doesn’t take much to uplift another or be uplifted by another.

Perhaps that is why we take these little gestures of recognition of the other for granted if we take them for anything at all. It seems that it is only when we have been uplifted by a kindly word or nod or smile that we realize just how important the person who uplifted us at that moment filled an important place in our life. It had been an empty space as we had been feeling a real emptiness. And now the void was filled.

Our lives are full of filling those empty spaces in the lives of others and having our emptiness filled by others, mostly in passing, but filling nevertheless. It’s not as if we walk around consciously looking for people whose lives we can fill by our very presence. Rather it is the recognition that we fill important places in the lives of others just by our very presence – and they do the same for us.

Nor is it important that we know that we have done so for another. The other may tell us that our smile or nod or word really meant something without having to explain what that something was. We understand because we have been on the receiving end of another’s kind smile that did so much to brighten our day even as we are at a loss to explain how that smile brightened our day.

What was important and what is always important is that we never forget just how we fill important places in the lives of others just by being who we are called to be: kind and caring people, people who have known emptiness but who have had that emptiness filled by the kindly actions of another. Little loving actions mean a lot, always have and always will. They are never unimportant and never will be.