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Daily reflections for Lenten Easter, written by Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI.

I’ve always found it ironic that we easily forget the big things, the events that seem of great importance.
Who won the Academy Awards five years ago? Who won the Super Bowl?

We quickly tend to forget these things, but we do not forget, with all the healing and grace it brought, is who was nice to us all those years ago on the playground at school.

Conversely, we also remember, and remember vividly with all the scars it brought. Who laughed at us on the playground, who made fun of our clothes or called us stupid?

Small acts of cruelty or kindness leave their effect long after the events have passed. And there is, I believe, a profound lesson in this.

The Kingdom of God, as Jesus tells us, is about mustard seeds, about small, seemingly unimportant things, but which, in the long run, are the big things?

Not much in our world today helps us to believe that most everything urges us to think big and to be careless about small things played out on the smaller stage of our personal lives, in our families, marriages, and in our exchanges with our neighbors and colleagues.

The little insults that we hand out, the small infidelities within our sexual lives, the many little acts of selfishness. These are deemed to be of little consequence.

And conversely, our small acts of sacrifice and selflessness, the little compliments that we hand out, these are not valued much in our culture.

But in the end, the only thing we may remember from a given year is some small mustard seed of cruelty or kindness.