IT USUALLY DOESN’T TAKE MUCH

 Author Leo Buscaglia once talked about a contest he was asked to judge. The purpose of the contest was to find the most caring child. The winner was a four-year-old child whose next door neighbor was an elderly gentleman who had recently lost his wife. Upon seeing the man cry, the little boy went into the old gentleman's yard, climbed into his lap, and just sat there. When his mother asked him what he had said to the neighbor, the little boy said, "Nothing. I just helped him cry."

That was probably all the old gentleman needed at that moment. No words of wisdom or consolation, no promises of "if you need me, just give a call," nothing deep or profound was needed right then:  just someone to cry with him, to feel with him, to be with him.

So often, I think, we think that it takes a lot to be a Christian, that the demands to love one another are overwhelming if not downright burdensome. And, to tell the truth, sometimes they are. But not always and not most of the time. Most of the time all that is asked of us, all that the other needs from us, wants from us, is just to be there. Just be there and keep our mouths closed, our hands idle and our hearts open.

There is an old church-camp song that comes to mind that begins "it only takes a spark to get a fire going," and goes on to remind, "that's how it is with God's love, once you've experienced it." It only takes a spark. It only takes very little. That's how it is with God's love. That's how it is with love, always.

Our lives probably wouldn't be as complicated as we make them, our faith wouldn't be as difficult to live as we think it is, if we would only remember that it usually does not take much to be a person of faith. It doesn't take much to live out our faith.

The more I think about it, the more I realize that the problems we tend to have with our faith are not theological, like trying to understand God. They are intellectual in that we make it difficult to understand what faith in God demands of us as a response. We'll never understand God. That is a given. But we can certainly understand what God asks of us -- and the response to that asking does not depend upon our understanding the mind of the One who asks.

But we often act that way, like children. Like children we want to ask why God wants us to respond, want to know the reason for doing what God asks us to do. As parents we get exasperated when our children ask why. We want them to do what we ask them to do simply because we asked and want them to trust that we would never ask them to do anything that was wrong. But they ask us anyway. And we ask God.

Yet, just as we would not ask our children to do anything they could not do, so it is with God. And, again, that which we ask of our children, so with what God asks of us: it usually doesn't take much. There is no need for deep theological or intellectual questioning. Like the little boy in the story, it is usually no more than sitting with the other and helping him to cry.