Touching Lives

“...we can easily be overwhelmed by personal feelings of inadequacy or sheer physical powerlessness, by the realization of one man’s seeming insignificance in a corrupt world. We tend to concentrate on ourselves, we tend to think of what we can or cannot do, and we forget about God and his will and his providence. Yet God never forgets each individual’s significance, his dignity and worth, and the role each has been asked to play in the workings of his providence. To him, each individual is equally important at all times. He cares. Be he also expects each man to accept, as from his hands, the daily situations he sends him and to act as he would have him act and gives him the grace to act.

What each man can change, first of all, is himself. And each will have—indeed, must have—some influence on the people God brings into his life each day. He is expected, as a Christian, to influence them for good. He may instead influence them for evil, but they will touch his life this day—for God sees to that—and he will therefore have some influence of some kind upon them. He will in some small way at least touch their lives, too, and it is in that touching that God will hold him responsible for the good or ill he does. In that simple truth lies the key to any understanding of the mystery of divine providence and ultimately of each man’s salvation.”
~Walter Ciszek